


the artifice of bluebirds in the snow

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, Depression, Everything is consensual, M/M, No Sexual Content, no one is underage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 00:10:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13019139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: Mike doesn’t expect much when he has to switch schools for his senior year of high school; he’ll keep his head down, get his work done, wait it out, and get on with his life.Well, that was the plan.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LegendsofSnark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LegendsofSnark/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks [FrivolousSuits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits) for your invaluable research help and for listening while I talked through some of the sticking points!

A single glance up at the smudged façade of Ulysses S. Grant High School plainly tells the story.  
  
You fucked up something awful, kid. Good luck digging yourself out of this hole.  
  
Most of the thousand-odd students marching toward the concrete bunker have been studying here long enough to be used to it, to make the best of things as they are or figure out ways around caring, and Mike might be new but he’s spent the past six years building up a rancorous disdain for everything life can throw at him and that isn’t something that can be defeated by a simple change of venue. He follows the masses through the heavy wooden double doors and finds that the brown and beige tiled hall floor and off-white stucco ceiling meet his expectations exactly; the only real surprise is that the school has an actual auditorium rather than needing to resort to using the gymnasium.  
  
Mike slouches in the back row as the Principal Pearson delivers a terse welcoming speech, basically boiling down to the same “Work hard and don’t embarrass me” litany that precedes every school year at every high school across the country. Then Vice Principal Bodinski stands to introduce herself and announce the staff changes that’ll be taking effect this year, and Mike picks at a hole in the navy blue padding of his stadium seat and tunes out the names of people he doesn’t know and has no intention of getting close to.  
  
First period is double American Government, where Mike has a hard time getting a read on Miss Scott, who dresses like she just stepped off a movie set, and a harder time ignoring Claire Bowden, who makes a point of introducing herself by her full name before giving a lengthy answer to some question about the foundations of democracy that Mike doesn’t pay particular attention to. He left a couple of prototype Claires back at Saint Andrew’s, smart girls who aren’t great at thinking outside of the box, who can’t fathom things like the American legal system stabbing its citizens in the back instead of defending them to the death (and thereafter), but who keep perfect notes and scribble pretentious annotations in the margins of their textbooks. She’ll draw enough attention to herself to keep it off of Mike, so that’s good.  
  
Third period is Calculus, wherein the teacher— _Doctor_ Litt, he annunciates nasally when he introduces himself—spends nearly twenty minutes putting the fear of god in their hearts that he doesn’t care whether they’ve graduated every math class since Kindergarten with an A-double plus, this will be _the_ most difficult endeavor they’ve ever undertaken. Then he makes some analogy about ponies that Mike doesn’t entirely follow and begins writing rows of unfinished equations on the chalkboard, instructing them all to complete the problems before class tomorrow and you do not want to know what will happen if you ever step into my presence with dying batteries in your calculator, lost notebooks will not be returned, and why are you just sitting there like a bunch of wet rats, get to work and I mean _now._  
  
It’s fine. Calculus is just a bunch of tests and problem sets, rote memorization and shit; Mike will be fine.  
  
Having already taken Physics his junior year at Saint Andrew’s, he basically sleeps through fourth period, dreaming about the clichéd peanut butter and jelly sandwich flattened in the side pocket of his backpack.  
  
Then comes English.  
  
“I am Mister Specter,” the teacher announces at exactly one forty, tossing the classroom door shut, “and you all signed up for Absurdist Fiction or got stuck with it because Masters of Science Fiction was full. The first book we’re going to be reading is Joseph Heller’s _Catch-22_ , because it’s one of my favorites and it’ll take up a decent amount of time, and next is Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_ , because it’s short, and we’ll see where we go from there. Any questions?”  
  
A few students look uncertainly at one another, and one girl cautiously raises her hand.  
  
“Mister Specter, are we— We’re not really reading _The Metamorphosis_ just because it’s _short,_ are we?”  
  
Mister Specter fixes her with a droll expression and holds up a thick volume that Mike can’t read the title of.  
  
“It’s either that or _Gravity’s Rainbow_ ,” he says as though the very fact of the book’s existence makes him ill, as though he owns it simply for the pleasure of holding it up to tell others not to bother. “Anything else?”  
  
The girl folds her hands in her lap and looks away. No one else seems to have any questions, or maybe they’ve all been frightened off, and Mister Specter clears his throat.  
  
“Alright,” he says as he turns to the chalkboard behind him, “before I start teaching you how to read, I want to know how you all think, so get out a notebook or some scrap paper and write an essay or a short story or whatever you like, incorporating these topics.”  
  
LOYALTY, he writes, underlining it with a heavy swoop, and Mike wonders if this class is going to be a socialist dictatorship. BLACKMAIL, he writes, pressing down extra hard on the second “L,” and Mike wonders if he’s gotten himself in over his head. HONOR, he writes, the word sloping down at a bit of an angle as he nears the edge of the board, and Mike wonders if Mister Specter’s ever read Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War_.  
  
“Make sure you put your name at the top,” Mister Specter says as he turns back to them, “because you’ll be handing them in when you’re done.” Taking a seat at his desk, he cracks open a secondhand copy of _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ , and the rest of them might as well have disappeared.  
  
Mike taps his pen against the edge of his chair and rests his chin in his palm as he wonders what Mister Specter’s story is.  
  
_Nature,_ he prints after a minute, _does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation._  
  
This is either going to end very well or very poorly.  
  
\---  
  
The first week of school passes predictably enough. Homework is plentiful and boring, pop quizzes are mildly surprising and stupidly easy, teachers surreptitiously pick out their star pupils, none of them Mike, and that one eleventh grader spends half an hour every day freaking out that she isn’t doing enough to really make her college applications stand out and should probably start a model UN club or something.  
  
Mike makes it the whole five days without talking to a single other student and considers the whole affair a rousing success.  
  
\---  
  
Nearly a month goes by before Grammy musters the courage to ask him how things are going.  
  
“Have you made any new friends?” she asks as they sit down to dinner.  
  
He shakes his head. “Mm-mm. Not yet,” he amends when she fixes her water glass with a frustrated stare. “I mean, you know, a lot of them have been there since first grade and I just got there right when everyone’s about to leave.”  
  
“Well I hope you keep trying,” she says. “You’re one of the smartest boys at that entire school, I’m sure you can find something in common with at least one of them.”  
  
Mike pushes the peas and carrots around on his plate. “You don’t know the other boys,” he mutters.  
  
“No,” she agrees, “but I’ve known _you_ your entire life.”  
  
Shrugging, Mike takes a bite of twice-reheated rotisserie chicken and then stands to walk his plate to the counter.  
  
“How are all your classes?” she asks, and Mike sighs deeply.  
  
“Classes are fine,” he says. “Straight As.”  
  
“Do you have a favorite teacher?” she presses, and he sighs again.  
  
“Not really,” he grits out. “I’m pretty sure the Calc teacher is insane, but it’s basically all the same old shit.”  
  
She doesn’t bother to chastise his language, and he takes a box of plastic wrap out of the drawer next to the refrigerator.  
  
Double English tomorrow. It’s still early; if he hurries up with his last Physics lab, he can reread _Catch-22_ before he goes to sleep.  
  
\---  
  
“Mike.”  
  
Wincing, Mike pauses halfway through the motion of throwing his backpack over his shoulder, letting it fall into the crook of his elbow. He’s up to date on all his assignments and he hasn’t disrupted class, particularly, if you don’t count that time last week when he said that Kyle Durant was being dense for arguing that the soldier in white is a symbol of purity and idealism, and staying late is going to make him late to Calculus.  
  
Alright, maybe this is a good thing.  
  
Mike walks up to Mister Specter’s desk and stops in front of it, shifting his weight to the right and trying not to look too tense.  
  
“Mister Specter,” he drones. Specter arches his eyebrows and leans back in his chair, and whatever he’s about to say, Mike has a feeling that it wasn’t what he was planning on when he called Mike over.  
  
“Usually problem kids are transferred _into_ Catholic school,” he says wryly. “So what happened to you?”  
  
_What?_  
  
Mike’s mouth falls open and he fumbles for a witty retort, or even a coherent one, but words have deserted him entirely; Specter just smirks, and Mike isn’t sure if he should be resentful or accept the obvious challenge. It makes sense that the teachers would all know where he came from, but something about hearing it out loud from someone like Mister Specter, who doesn’t seem to give a damn about much of anything, keeps him from storming off.  
  
“What makes you think something happened to me,” he bites out, which makes Specter roll his eyes dramatically.  
  
“You’re a straight-A student,” he says. “Your permanent record doesn’t have any disciplinary infractions on it, Saint Andrew’s didn’t kick you out and they’re a way better school than this dump. What’s your story?”  
  
“You really missed your calling as a detective,” Mike retorts thoughtlessly.  
  
“And you really missed yours as someone who gives a fuck,” Specter parries. Mike cocks his head; he’s pretty sure he’s never heard a teacher swear before. It’s humanizing in a way he never realized was particularly necessary.  
  
“I give a fuck,” he mutters, and Specter scoffs.  
  
“Come on, Mike,” he says. “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”  
  
A bullshitter, huh? So all that flippancy and detachment isn’t just an innovative new-age teaching technique.  
  
Mike decides to take a risk.  
  
“I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.”  
  
Rather than come back with some demeaning jab, Specter looks at Mike in such a way that Mike is reasonably sure his entire value as a human person is in the process of being determined. It’s the most uncomfortable Mike can remember feeling since that time when he was eleven and Father Walker sat down beside him on the stairs next to the cemetery to tell him that not going into the church for the open-casket part of the funeral wasn’t going to change what had happened to his parents.  
  
Then Specter smiles at him, and Mike still isn’t sure what the test was, but he thinks he might have accidentally passed.  
  
“You’re a smart kid, Mike,” Specter says. “Come talk to me again when you wise up a little.”  
  
Mike smirks. “I’ll do that.”  
  
“Looking forward to it.”  
  
Specter nods, and Mike shoves his free arm through the loose strap of his backpack, hiking up his shoulders as he walks out into the hall.  
  
_There’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom._  
  
He’s heard that one before.  
  
Halfway down the hall toward his Calculus class, Mike decides he would rather turn off toward the only single-stall bathroom on the entire floor, the one with a door he can lock and a rusty faucet he can turn on to drip into a cracked basin while he kneels over the toilet bowl and tries to stop hyperventilating over nothing.  
  
Tears collect in the corners of his eyes as he accidentally bangs his head on the porcelain seat, and this is just one of those things that happens sometimes.  
  
One of these days, things will be better.  
  
\---  
  
“So you’re Mike, right?”  
  
Mike looks up; standing over him is the girl who asked about _The Metamorphosis_ on the first day of class. Rachel, he thinks her name is.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, watching her slide into the desk beside him and thinking of how strange it feels to be talking so freely with someone he’s probably supposed to know pretty well by now. She’s in Calculus with him, too, though she doesn’t speak much there.  
  
“And how’s _your_ year going?” she asks as she takes out her English notebook and a pencil. He has the sense that she wants him to say it’s been hideously difficult and feels a little bad that he can’t.  
  
“I guess it’s fine,” he says. “You know. I’m not here to have fun, I’m here to learn.”  
  
She giggles, and he leans his arms down on his desk.  
  
“How about you?”  
  
“You know, I’m here to learn,” she mimics with a small smile; he appreciates the effort, but then she shakes her head. “No, actually, Calc is absolutely killing me. I took Pre-Calc with Doctor Litt two years ago, so I figured I’d be okay, but I guess I must’ve forgotten what a total psycho he is.”  
  
Mike nods. It occurs to him at that moment, for reasons beyond his understanding, that he’s been quietly terrified of dying for as long as he can remember, but he doesn’t think Rachel is particularly interested in hearing about that.  
  
“I could help you study,” he says instead, thinking of how nice Grammy will think it is when he tell her he’s made a friend.  
  
“Oh—no,” Rachel says, laughing, “that’s not what I meant.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
She bites her lip and taps her pencil rapidly against her notebook cover.  
  
“I…”  
  
Before she finishes accepting his offer, or turning it down, Mister Specter enters the room, and they all know well enough to shut the hell up.  
  
The wall clock is stuck at 11:07.  
  
Mike wonders if anyone will bother to change the battery.  
  
\---  
  
Mike gets a B-plus on his ten-page _Catch-22_ paper with a note underneath the last paragraph that reads: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Tell me something I don’t know. Wonder why you didn’t push on the inevitability of death angle, felt like you were really onto something.”  
  
Rachel and her best friend Katrina lean towards each other to compare their papers’ annotations, and Mike looks up at Mister Specter, who arches his eyebrows goadingly.  
  
Was I really?  
  
Mike shove his paper down into his backpack and nods to himself.  
  
You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.  
  
\---  
  
All through class the next day, Mister Specter gives Mike these little looks like he’s trying to figure out a particularly frustrating puzzle, and Mike pretends not to notice.  
  
Afterwards, at two twenty-five, he lingers in his seat until everyone else has gone and wonders if he managed to fool anyone. Maybe no one was paying attention.  
  
“The essay wasn’t that bad, was it?” he asks, resting his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand.  
  
Specter stops packing his books away and looks at him.  
  
“You don’t have the kind of smarts that come from books,” he says, as though he’s been stuck on the point for ages and can’t figure out how to build on it. “You’re a special guy, Mike, but I think you’ve gotten lazy, maybe because you’re used to being around people who know what to expect of you. You can push yourself a lot further than where you are now.”  
  
That’s some kind of gauntlet to throw down.  
  
As Mike walks down the hall toward the front doors, he tries to decide whether to be flattered or insulted and settles on a bit of both.  
  
\---  
  
“I’ll be out when you get home from school tomorrow,” Grammy says as Mike paws around in the freezer for some microwaveable manicotti. “I’m not sure when my appointment is going to end.”  
  
“Appointment?” Mike asks as he unearths a damp box of chicken nuggets that has to be at least five years old.  
  
“With Doctor Cole,” she says. The rheumatologist, Mike remembers; Grammy’s seen him a couple of times before, though she’s never explained why she has to go, or what he tells her. “It’s nothing serious,” she dismisses, “but you know how these doctors are, thinking their time is so much more valuable than mine. He’d keep me there overnight if he could, just to keep me from spending my time the way I want.”  
  
“That’s not what they think,” Mike admonishes, finally landing on a plastic bag of cheese and spinach ravioli. “Everything okay?”  
  
“Everything’s fine, I’m healthy as a horse.”  
  
She’s sixty-eight years old, is what she is. Mike turns the tap on and shoves an empty pot beneath the water.  
  
“I’m staying late anyway,” he says. She makes a high-pitched noise in place of an inquiry, and he turns off the tap. “Studying with friends.”  
  
She doesn’t respond for awhile, which is fair; at Saint Andrew’s, “studying with friends” was unsubtle code for “cutting class” or “smoking cheap weed with Trevor” or “sneaking into constructions sites to set off cherry bombs.” This time will be different, though, this time for sure. He’s at a new school, he’s got a clean slate; things have been going fine so far, there’s no reason to assume they’ll stop.  
  
“Studying what?” she asks cautiously.  
  
“Calculus.” He rips open the pasta bag and pours an arbitrary amount into the pot. “My friend Rachel. She’s smart but she has test anxiety.”  
  
Yeah, I’ve got a friend. So how about that?  
  
“That sounds very nice,” Grammy says. “Have fun.”  
  
Mike feels just fine.  
  
\---  
  
Because all the teachers are required to, Mister Specter has office hours, but Mike is pretty sure none of his classmates have ever made any use of them; Rachel seems like the type, but then, she seems to be pretty confident in her English skills without, and it might be some sort of pride thing at this point, or maybe they have a history he doesn’t know about. At any rate, when he stops by at two twenty-five, the beginning of seventh period, there isn’t a line or anything, and the office, which is shared by all three of the school’s English teachers, is empty except for Specter, who’s got his feet up on his desk and a book called _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ propped open on his knees.  
  
“Mister Ross,” Specter says, sticking an index card into the book and putting it down on his stomach. “What can I do for you?”  
  
Mike looks down at his sneakers.  
  
“I got an F on a History paper,” he says, “because I cut classes for an afternoon, and Father Walker didn’t want to suspend me.”  
  
Specter doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of that.  
  
After a minute, or maybe half, he lowers his feet to the floor and puts the book on his desk in their stead.  
  
“I got my Bachelor’s in Psychology because I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” he replies. “And I’m teaching English at the first public school that would take me while I try to figure it out.”  
  
So that’s the way this is gonna go.  
  
Mike smirks, raising his gaze to Mister Specter’s chest while he works up the nerve to look him in the eye.  
  
“It was my idea to transfer to public school,” he says, unsurprised that the second admission comes easier, even though the weight of the words is different. “Before I left, I stole nine hundred and thirty-six dollars that my parents had donated to the church collection box, three dollars a week for six years, and Father Walker knew it, but he didn’t have me arrested.”  
  
“He suspected,” Specter corrects, folding his hands and dropping them down on his knees. “He could’ve had you arrested, but without the cash, it wouldn’t have stuck. There are a million reasons your prints might’ve been on that box.”  
  
Mike shrugs. “I did it.”  
  
“Sure,” Specter says. “But guilty men go free all the time.”  
  
It’s not funny, but it’s the first time anyone’s ever responded to his story, to any part of his story, with such a complete lack of farce, with such unabashed acceptance, and Mike can’t help laughing. Looking away, fixating on the shallow bookcase lining the wall to his right, he hears Mister Specter join in, and it’s hard to believe that this is all happening the way his eyes and his ears are telling him it is, but he badly wants to and his brain says that he can.  
  
They stop laughing in a natural sort of way, trailing off at about the same speed; Mister Specter doesn’t say anything more, and Mike’s curiosity badgers him until he turns away from the bookcase and accidentally meets Mister Specter’s careful gaze.  
  
“Thank you, Mike,” Mister Specter says.  
  
Blinking quickly, as though he needs to clear his vision, Mike nods.  
  
“Thank you, Mister Specter.”  
  
It didn’t sound like an invitation in his head, and it wasn’t supposed to come out like one, but Specter looks at him in that dissecting way he has and Mike hopes he isn’t going to catch hell for what just happened. Whatever it was.  
  
Mister Specter narrows his eyes.  
  
“Harvey,” he says. “Mike.”  
  
Harvey Specter.  
  
Mike smiles.  
  
“Thanks, Harvey.”  
  
\---  
  
Throughout the month of October, every member of the senior class is required to meet with the guidance counselor, if they haven’t already done so, to discuss applying to colleges, the implication being that they’ve already given the matter quite a bit of thought and have at least their general application well underway, seeing as how the majority of schools require them to be postmarked by November first.  
  
Mike waits outside the guidance counselor’s office and pushes up the left sleeve of his hoodie, following the ticking second hand of his watch without actually taking note of the time. There’s a clock at the end of the hall that he could check, too, but he doesn’t look there, either. He doesn’t particularly want to think about the fact that today is nineteen ninety-seven, October ninth, Thursday, one fifteen post meridiem and seven seconds, eight seconds, nine, ten, et cetera, et cetera.  
  
College is a two- to four-year commitment.  
  
Mike wonders what he wants to do with his life. Then he forgets about that and starts wondering what he _can._  
  
At one seventeen, the door to the guidance counselor’s office opens and a boy named Seth, who Mike recognizes from History, walks out with a frustrated crease in his brow that deepens when he spies Mike off to the side with his one sleeve pushed up and his backpack on his lap, nearly empty except for a single notebook and pencil that’s always in there in case of emergency. He scoffs as he walks past, and Mike knows that Seth doesn’t like him but he’s always envisioned Seth to be made up of a compilation of decaying dog teeth and the smell of Play-Doh, and he doesn’t need a guy like that in his life. Especially not when that guy is best friends with Kyle Durant, who thinks the soldier in white represents purity and idealism and probably doesn’t understand the ridiculousness of the army censoring letters for trying to convey the horrors of war to people who’ve never had to live through them and would absolutely not understand.  
  
Mike knocks on the door as he enters the office. The guidance counselor is a pretty woman with long red hair who Mike has never felt the need to interact with before; the placard on her desk says her name is Donna Paulsen, which he considers to be a pretty good fit.  
  
“I’m Mike,” he says. “Ross.”  
  
“Yes, I know,” she says, smiling up at him. “Sorry that meeting ran long, you can stay an extra couple of minutes if you need to.”  
  
Mike sits in the vacant chair set up across from her and decides that he probably won’t need to.  
  
“So I don’t know what we’re supposed to talk about,” he says, “but they told me I needed to see you.”  
  
Miss Paulsen reaches into her filing cabinet and pulls out a folder with Mike’s name on it.  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “Before we start talking about colleges, I just want to let you know that I’m here anytime you want to talk to anyone, anytime you need help with anything, you should feel free to come on by and we can talk about whatever you want.”  
  
He nods, smiling a little as though he plans to take her up on the offer at some point down the line, and she smiles back, opening the folder with Mike’s name on it.  
  
“I see you’re getting pretty much straight As,” she commends, “so that’s great; what colleges are you thinking about applying to?”  
  
Mike wonders how a person goes about getting certified to teach public school English.  
  
“I’ve always wanted to go to Harvard,” he says, Harvard being the snobbiest, most prestigious school he can think of off the top of his head. “I’m applying to CUNY. Or SUNY. I guess, I mean, I don’t really know the difference.”  
  
Miss Paulsen picks his transcript up out of the folder and looks at him over the top.  
  
“Well, CUNY is run by the city and SUNY is run by the state, for one thing, so there are more SUNY institutions,” she explains slowly, “and their deadlines are a little later than most schools, but if you’ve always wanted to go to Harvard, is there any reason in particular you’re not applying there? You’re not even going to try?”  
  
He shrugs. “I don’t see why I should apply to a school I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to even if I got in,” he says, as though it’s a dream he’s long since given up on. “Waste of time, waste of money.”  
  
It’s probably in her job description to tell him to pursue his passions, but he sees it in her eyes that she knows he’s right. Besides, working at a shithole like this, she’s probably used to that excuse.  
  
“There are scholarships,” she ventures.  
  
“I’ve tried that,” he lies. She nods slowly, empathetically, and that’s the end of that.  
  
“Okay, so CUNY and SUNY are pretty broad categories,” she says. “Have you thought about which schools specifically you want to apply to? Any field you’re especially interested in pursuing?”  
  
Mike shrugs, and he wonders if she’s used to this kind of uncertainty, too.  
  
“I see you’ve raised your grade in Mister Specter’s English class from a B-plus to an A.” She offers an encouraging smile. “That’s very impressive, I know some students find him…challenging.”  
  
Do they?  
  
“Okay,” Mike says, and the smile falls from Miss Paulsen’s face.  
  
“Have you given any thought to majoring in English?” she presses. “I can give you a list of SUNY schools with good English programs that you could investigate, I’m sure Mister Specter would write you a letter of recommendation.”  
  
This tiny room is painted some eggshell-type version of off-white, but the fluorescent lights make it look sort of blue.  
  
“I want to help people,” he says whimsically, and she latches onto it like a life preserver.  
  
“There are tons of fields you could go into for that,” she says. “Psychology, Social Work, Education, Community Organizing, uh; Medicine, Law…”  
  
His lip twitches up at the thought of lawyers, of settlements, of the monetary evaluation of a life, but she seems to interpret it as a positive thing, and it’s okay, really. She doesn’t know any better.  
  
“You know what, I’m going to give you these pamphlets for Stony Brook University and the University at Albany,” she says, fishing around in one of her desk drawers. “They both have pretty good pre-law programs you might want to look into.”  
  
“Okay,” he says, and she smiles again.  
  
What can two people understand about each other in ten minutes?  
  
“So take a look at these.”  
  
Okay.  
  
\---  
  
Mike’s essay on _The Metamorphosis_ goes a little better than the one he wrote for _Catch-22_. He mercilessly rips into Gregor’s family from every possible angle, working himself into a fury that nearly spills over into yelling at Grammy for god knows what and keeps him up half the night tossing and turning, and it feels sort of good to be allowed to be so angry about something so inconsequential.  
  
When he gets the paper back, the grade is an A, but Harvey’s drawn a little sad face at the end of the last paragraph, and he wonders what that’s all about.  
  
\---  
  
Tell me what you see.  
  
Mike folds his hands in his lap and meets Miss Pearson’s eyes without challenge, without ire, without particular fear for his future. She folds her hands atop her desk and leans forward without malice, without menace, without particularly distinguishing him from the herd. This is how things will be and that’s that, but there’s no need to get emotional about it.  
  
“Why are you here?” she asks plainly, and he refolds his hands so that his right thumb is on top of his left.  
  
“I told Claire Bowden she was delusional,” he replies dutifully, and she sits back in her chair.  
  
“Delusional?” she repeats. Mike nods, and she sighs. “If Miss Scott sent you to me, I’ll assume a considerable amount of shouting was involved.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Miss Pearson frowns. “Would you care to tell me _why?_ ”  
  
How to explain that it seemed like a good idea at the time?  
  
Mike shrugs, and Miss Pearson arches her eyebrows.  
  
“Frankly, Mister Ross, the normal protocol in these situations is to put students on academic probation, but as you don’t seem to be involved in any extracurricular activities, I’m sure you’d agree that that wouldn’t carry much weight as a form of punishment.”  
  
The air in this office is sort of stale, every inch of every surface piled high with papers that can’t be helping with the filtration system. It’s sort of sad that the principal has to have her office right at the crux of the school, equally accessible by every department but forbidding her access to a nice view, or a window to open.  
  
“So, Mister Ross, what do you suggest I do about this?”  
  
Mike looks at the desk lamp next to the computer.  
  
“Expel me?”  
  
Miss Pearson grits her teeth.  
  
“You don’t seem to be taking the situation very seriously.”  
  
Last night Mike dreamed that he had to perform experiments tranquilizing robotic bumblebees at various elevations above sea level for reasons which were obvious and critically important at the time but now he can’t remember for the life of him.  
  
“I am,” he says, because she knows he isn’t, but the PTA would appreciate it if he did, and they’re trying their best with what little they have.  
  
Miss Pearson narrows her eyes; Mike wonders if she and Harvey spend a lot of time together.  
  
“You’ll serve detention after school today,” she tells him, “and I’d like you to apologize to Miss Bowden.”  
  
“Should I write a thousand-word essay on the consequences of my actions?” he asks.  
  
“Would you like to?”  
  
Would it make you feel better?  
  
Dust mites float around in the air illuminated by the desk lamp.  
  
“No ma’am.”  
  
She nods, and he stands up from his chair.  
  
“Did I say you could leave?”  
  
“Can I?”  
  
She’d rather not give him this one, he sees it in her eyes, but making up a reason to keep him would be petty and small.  
  
“This period ends in twelve minutes.”  
  
He looks over his shoulder at the closed office door.  
  
“So I shouldn’t go back to class?”  
  
“Use your best judgment.”  
  
Mike says “Uh-huh,” closing the office door behind him. The History hallway is conveniently adjacent to the English hallway at about a forty-five degree angle, almost as though they’re _asking_ him to go.  
  
Why not.  
  
The door to the office shared by all three of the school’s English teachers is shut when Mike gets there. Through the viewing window, which takes up about half the height of the door but is only three inches across, he spies a teacher whose face he recognizes but whose name he doesn’t know, speaking to a student with long dark hair who has her back turned to the door. Harvey sits at his desk with a stack of papers in front of him and a red pen in his hand.  
  
Mike puts his hands behind his back and leans against the wall.  
  
After maybe five minutes, the student opens the door—her name is Stephanie, Mike remembers when she smiles condescendingly—and sashays past him, which doesn’t bother Mike but does make Harvey look up, in his direction.  
  
“Mike, just give me a minute to wrap this up,” he says, as though they’ve got some kind of meeting scheduled.  
  
“Okay,” Mike says, as though he planned for this.  
  
Looking between them, the other teacher gathers up a couple of books and walks past Harvey, and then past Mike, and then into the English classroom closest to the History hallway. Mike waits for the clutch of students shuffling down the hall to clear out to tend to their various obligations before he shuffles into the English office, closing the door behind him as Harvey drops his pen and looks up at him for three whole seconds.  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
Mike laughs, ducking his head down and muffling the sound into his chest. What was the fucking giveaway, huh? Was it me?  
  
He grabs another teacher’s desk chair and drags it opposite Harvey, sitting with a muffled thump.  
  
“I cut class because it was parent-teacher conference day,” he confesses to Harvey’s shins, “and I was a straight-A student, and all my teachers would’ve said nice things about me, and talked about how hard I was working, and everything I’d accomplished, and overcome, and I would’ve gotten better reviews than just about everyone else in class, and I know for a fact there were some other kids whose parents would’ve heard that and asked them why they weren’t doing better, why they weren’t doing as well as that Michael Ross boy, he’s a cheater with that eidetic memory thing of his.” He raises his gaze to Harvey’s knees and bites his tongue.  
  
“And I know if I’d been there I would’ve yelled at them,” he says as he tastes the blood coursing through his veins, “I would’ve said really awful, really unfair things, I would’ve stormed out and I don’t know if I would’ve ever come back, so I cut, I skipped the whole goddamn thing, but I couldn’t tell Father Walker that, and I couldn’t tell my grandmother, because they’ve always tried to do what they thought was best for me. They’ve always tried to help, but the thing is that no one really knows how to help a kid who’s just lost his parents so they tell him he needs to be a grown-up, they tell him he needs to act like an adult all of a sudden and they’re sorry and it’s gonna be tough but this is how it is, and this is hard on all of us but we’ve all gotta do our part, so shut up and do what we tell you, just hold your head up high and throw your shoulders back and deal with it.”  
  
This is too much to feel.  
  
Mike raises his clasped hands in front of his mouth.  
  
I should explain, but. How do I begin?  
  
It certainly wasn’t supposed to be like this.  
  
Harvey doesn’t nod, and he doesn’t grimace, and he doesn’t make those little “Hm” noises that people who fancy themselves therapists usually do. Mike wants to thank him, but the normal words don’t quite fit.  
  
“Mike.”  
  
Mike clenches his teeth so tight that they start to hurt.  
  
There’s a certain lightness in his heart for having said all that he did, for getting it out there into the air, a feeling in his stomach that he doesn’t know how to describe other than as the opposite of nausea, except that Harvey is still there, looking at him, and all at once he feels a whole lot worse.  
  
“Sorry,” he says, pressing his hands down on the armrests of the chair where he sits. He should say something more, but he can’t think of what, so he starts to leave before he really embarrasses himself.  
  
“Mike—”  
  
Harvey’s got quick reflexes.  
  
Mike twists his arm halfheartedly as he rises the rest of the way to his feet, and Harvey lets him go.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mike says again. “It’s not your job to listen to all my shit, I just… I don’t know.” Covering his eyes, squeezing his temples between his middle finger and his thumb, he tries to laugh it off.  
  
“I’m going home.”  
  
“Thank you,” Harvey cuts in, and Mike laughs again.  
  
“Yeah, whatever.”  
  
Harvey thins his lips in a narrow line and stands.  
  
“Thank you,” he repeats as Mike crosses his arms over his chest. “I mean it. Thank you for telling me that. If you want to go home, I’m not going to stop you, but if you want to—if you want to talk, I’m here.”  
  
Harvey is still there, looking at him, and Mike’s heart is light and his stomach is heavy and he feels better and worse and worse and worse, and he wants to cry and he doesn’t, and he crosses his arms tighter and he throws his shoulders back, and he’s a big strong grown-up, he sure is.  
  
He’s not leaving, though, is the thing. It’s the thing that Harvey notices. He puts his hand on Mike’s shoulder, and, okay. Alright. Alright.  
  
Mike shuffles closer, leaning in, and Harvey wraps his arms around him.  
  
This period ends in twenty-seven minutes.  
  
\---  
  
Friday, the last day of school before winter break, Harvey announces that their vacation homework is a play called _No Exit_ , which is one of those things Mike has always meant to read but never gotten around to for one reason or another, even though he already knows the twist, if you can call it that. Hell is other people, as though he didn’t already suspect as much.  
  
The play’s been on the syllabus since the beginning of the semester, but Mike wonders if maybe Harvey’s thinking about him when he assigns it.  
  
Maybe he shouldn’t be so conceited.  
  
\---  
  
Mike finished _No Exit_ on Saturday afternoon in about half an hour. It’s pretty good.  
  
Trevor comes over a couple of times in the first two weeks and they talk about school and shit. It sounds like everything’s pretty much the same at Saint Andrew’s, except that a few kids are glad Mike is gone because the curve has started playing out in their favor. Mike starts to tell Trevor about Harvey, but he stops just as quickly, knowing that no matter how he tries to explain it, the words will come out wrong; instead he rants about Doctor Litt and tells Trevor about the time he wrote out his homework in calligraphy ink, just to see what would happen, the answer being that despite the fact that all the work was correct, Litt basically had an aneurism. They laugh at the story, even though Trevor doesn’t really get it, and Mike thinks it’s pretty dumb, and things are almost back to the way they used to be except for the big glass wall between them.  
  
Trevor says they should hang out more, and Mike says “Yeah, man, totally,” and they both sort of know that they won’t. Maybe later, but not right now.  
  
On Christmas Eve, Mike and Grammy have a pretty nice dinner that leaves enough leftovers for a whole week, so that’s pretty handy, but it somehow makes all the days blend into each other and they forget to stay up late for New Year’s; there are fireworks over the East River at midnight, but it doesn’t occur to Mike what they’re for until he wakes up the next morning and wonders offhandedly if Harvey had anyone to spend the evening with.  
  
A few hours later, or maybe a few days, Grammy goes out for an afternoon with friends, and being that it’s the last Monday of winter break, Mike gives himself permission to stop thinking, camping out on the couch in the living room to watch _Seinfeld_ reruns in the dark.  
  
Three episodes pass before, for no particular reason, he finds himself overcome by loneliness, and it’s not as though he’s never been lonely before, obviously, who hasn’t. But thank god he’s alone because he’s suddenly crying uncontrollably, his nails scraping the cushions as he clenches his fists, his lungs compressing as he hunches over and makes it harder on himself to breathe, and this is pathetic, this is so pathetic.  
  
The phone starts ringing then, and it might be important, and Mike should answer it, and what kind of stupid fucking loser is he, sitting here alone in the dark, crying, wailing, but he won’t, he won’t, he can’t.  
  
What are people supposed to do when they get this sad?  
  
Just you wait. All things come to an end.  
  
About an hour and ten minutes later, the time measured in _Seinfeld_ episodes and commercial breaks, the phone rings again, and don’t worry, everything is fine now. Mike picks up the receiver and says “Hello,” and Rachel greets him brightly, inviting him out with her and Katrina to hang around the park or whatever, maybe go into the city or something. He should accept, having nothing better to do, but he doesn’t, and she just says “Okay, maybe some other time,” and he wonders if she really expected him to say yes in the first place.  
  
He probably should have.  
  
No he shouldn’t.  
  
It’s a little late for second thoughts.  
  
\---  
  
The day before school starts up again, Mike rereads _No Exit_ , even though he doesn’t need to, and wonders what would happen if he found himself in Hell, if anyone would ever be willing to redeem him for all the evil that he’s done. Not that it would bring his parents back to him or anything, but it might make him feel a little better for awhile.  
  
It wasn’t redemption, exactly, but telling Harvey about everything sure seemed to help. Smiling to himself, Mike wonders how Harvey’s doing, how he’s enjoying his time off.  
  
Out the window, up in the sky, scattered clouds drift off into the distance, and Mike wonders how Harvey feels about eating ice cream when it’s cold outside.  
  
\---  
  
Mike isn’t glad to be going back to school or anything, but when he accidentally wakes up at five o’clock, he figures he can either head in early or lie in the dark looking over at the clock every ten minutes until it finally ticks down to a more reasonable hour, which isn’t a difficult choice when it’s put in those terms, so.  
  
The façade of Ulysses S. Grant High School is a lot crisper in the dark.  
  
The doors aren’t open, of course, but that doesn’t matter. Mike tries them, just to be sure, just for fun, and it’s not that he couldn’t pick the lock, but the idea of wandering the empty halls makes his brain buzz in a way that makes him feel like he’s in a living horror movie. Instead he turns around and sits on the steps with his backpack in his lap, waiting for someone to come.  
  
It’s six fifteen, or thereabouts, when someone finally arrives.  
  
Hey, Universe. How’d you know?  
  
“Mister Specter,” he says as Harvey comes to a stop in front of the steps, in front of Mike.  
  
“Harvey,” he replies without missing a beat. “Mike.”  
  
It’s funny; Mike doesn’t think he was feeling any lonelier than usual just now, but then Harvey reintroduces himself as though they aren’t already friends and Mike smiles and Harvey smiles back, and the loneliness that’s apparently become such a part of him that he doesn’t even notice it anymore gets a little smaller.  
  
“How was your break?” Harvey asks as he starts up the steps, toward the door.  
  
“Fine,” Mike replies disingenuously as he stands, taking Harvey’s question as an invitation to follow him. Harvey looks at him skeptically, and Mike shrugs. “I read _No Exit_ a couple times, I hung out with my best friend a little. Made dinner with my Grammy.”  
  
That doesn’t sound like much, does it.  
  
“It was fun.”  
  
Harvey chuckles, and Mike smiles.  
  
“So that’s my life, how about you?”  
  
Digging a ring with maybe ten keys on it out of his coat pocket, Harvey unlocks the door and shoves it open, leaning in with his shoulder when it sticks in the frame. Mike follows him inside, down the hall with the brown and beige tile and the off-white stucco ceiling, toward the English hallway that’s adjacent to the History hallway at a forty-five degree angle.  
  
They make it all the way to Harvey’s shared office in companionable silence, and it’s not until Harvey’s unlocking that door, opening it and flicking the light switch on, that it occurs to Mike that he hasn’t gotten an answer to his last question.  
  
“Uh,” he ventures as Harvey puts his briefcase down on the floor and pushes it under his desk with his foot. “So, how was your break?”  
  
Harvey shakes his head with a funny little quirk to his lips. “Same old same old,” he says indifferently. “Nothing to write home about.”  
  
“Did you do anything for Christmas?” Mike goads, sitting on the edge of Harvey’s desk as Harvey sits in his chair and shakes his head again.  
  
“Can’t say that I did,” he admits. “I don’t mind; it’s been that way since college. My family and I aren’t really in touch.”  
  
Mike looks down uncomfortably, mumbling “Oh” under his breath.  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Harvey assures him. “Take my word for it, we’re all better off this way. But enough of my dumbass life story, how’s it feel to be back here for your last semester?”  
  
“It sucks,” Mike says instantly. Harvey snorts, and Mike grins at the floor. “But I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world, you know? I mean all winter break, I just kept thinking… I kept thinking, I could really use someone to talk to.”  
  
Harvey averts his eyes a bit.  
  
“I know the feeling.”  
  
Mike nods absently. Welcome to the uncanny valley.  
  
“I actually thought about you a lot.”  
  
“Mike.”  
  
“I did.” Nipping his lower lip, he smiles sardonically. “Every time something happened, I just wanted to know what you thought of it. I wanted to—I wanted to talk to you about it.”  
  
Even though he sees at the very edge of his vision that Harvey’s looking right at him, right at his face, Mike keeps his eyes on the floor. If Harvey would just say something, say anything, it might put everything in perspective. It might put him back on solid ground.  
  
Well, it might.  
  
Harvey wipes his hand across his mouth.  
  
“Mike,” he says as he lays his hands on his chair’s armrests. “What are you getting at?”  
  
The question might’ve been a good one if he knew the answer.  
  
Mike shrugs.  
  
“I’m not sure,” he admits. “Maybe nothing.”  
  
Harvey doesn’t respond, but Mike watches out of the corner of his eye as his gaze clings to Mike’s face.  
  
“Maybe something.”  
  
In most iterations of this conversation, the next lines would be “Are you saying what I think you’re saying,” or “I don’t think you understand what you’re asking,” or some stupid evasion to that effect. They both know better than that, though, they both know the answer is “Yes.” The answer is “I do, and you know it, too.”  
  
Harvey folds his hands together and drops them to his knees.  
  
“Is it nothing,” he asks, “or is it something?”  
  
Out the window at Harvey’s back, the world is dark, the distant streetlamps settled into a gauzy blur; the intimacy of the early hour, the liminal space between the end of winter vacation and the beginning of the last semester ever, the last opportunity to take a shot, lands them in another dimension, on another planet, at another place entirely, and Harvey wouldn’t ask if he didn’t already know the answer, and Mike can’t exactly help himself as he lays his hand on Harvey’s shoulder and leans forward.  
  
Is this nothing?  
  
Or is it something?  
  
In this strange place of just them, this miasmal land of dark and light, Harvey rests his hand on Mike’s chest and for a minute, Mike is terrified; of what, he isn’t sure, he doesn’t want to know, but then Harvey puts his other hand on Mike’s shoulder, guiding him the rest of the way down, and it doesn’t matter what was so frightening, he doesn’t care. This is a dream, a song half-remembered, happiness coming on with all the subtlety of a thunderstorm, and when Harvey stands to meet him on level ground as they cling to each other, Mike presses in as close as he can and defies anyone to ever experience a moment so desperately honest as this one.  
  
Mike pants heavily when they part, more from the emotional impact than the physical exertion, and Harvey swallows against his own labored breathing and kisses him again, softer, shorter, meeting Mike’s eyes with an awful sort of melancholy that Mike tells himself he expected from the start.  
  
“Mike,” he murmurs as he slides his hands down to Mike’s arms, taking half a step back to where his legs bump up against his desk chair. “We can’t.”  
  
For all that and more.  
  
Mike takes half a step forward, dropping his head against Harvey’s chest like a stone.  
  
“I don’t want to be alone.”  
  
Harvey wraps his arms around him and sighs.  
  
“I know.” He reaches up to pet Mike’s hair.  
  
“I know.”  
  
Mike sniffles.  
  
The gauzy streetlamps shutter in the blue light of dawn as muffled sounds of the beginning of a new day echo out in the halls; the dream is over, the song faded into silence, and when Mike takes a step back, Harvey lets him go.  
  
“Four more months,” Mike says somewhat disjointedly, hoisting his backpack up on his shoulder and sticking his hands in his pockets. Harvey tries to laugh, as though it’ll lighten the mood.  
  
“You got this.”  
  
Mike sweeps in for another quick kiss, and Harvey’s the responsible one, the one who should hold him off, but he’s only human, and no one has to know. Then Mike backs away, looking up apologetically and shrinking into his sweatshirt as he takes a step toward the door.  
  
“I uh, I liked _No Exit_ ,” he says. Harvey smiles.  
  
“Glad to hear it.”  
  
\---  
  
Time marches on, and Mike spends most of it staring out the window.  
  
On Thursday, at quarter after twelve, on his way to the cafeteria, he passes Harvey and Miss Paulsen walking down the hall, talking and laughing like old friends.  
  
He wasn’t that hungry to begin with.  
  
\---  
  
Their class spends the first two weeks of the new semester on _No Exit_ , not because it takes that long to discuss it but because Harvey’s not an idiot, he knows most of them haven’t read it yet.  
  
After that’s all said and done, he assigns them another one Mike’s always meant to read, _The Stranger_ by Albert Camus, and the way he looks into Mike’s eyes when he announces it makes it feel like a message that Mike should understand a lot better than he does.  
  
Mike reads it during Physics, and spends most of Calculus in that one single-stall bathroom with the door locked and the heels of his palms pressed to his eyes as he tries to stop his shoulders from shaking.  
  
\---  
  
“Did I tell you I saw Doctor Morella again yesterday?” Grammy asks as she pours oil onto a baking tray.  
  
Mike closes his History notebook and clicks his pen shut. “Who’s Doctor Morella?”  
  
“Some specialist Doctor Cole sent me to,” she says briskly, “a cardiologist or what have you, nothing to worry about, all her tests came out fine. I didn’t tell you? I could have sworn I told you. I meant to tell you.”  
  
She arranges halved new potatoes facedown along the oiled surface, and Mike bites his lip.  
  
“You didn’t.”  
  
“Turn on the oven for me, would you Michael? Four hundred degrees.”  
  
Mike gets up and tells himself not to read too much into anything.  
  
“So how’s the new semester going? Any favorite classes yet?”  
  
Mike grabs his notebook off the table and sticks his pen in the spiral binding.  
  
“English? I dunno, I mean it’s all basically the same. It’s fine. I gotta finish this.”  
  
Grammy nods and keeps arranging the potatoes.  
  
“Have fun!”  
  
Right.  
  
Up in his room, Mike throws the notebook onto his bed and sits at his desk with his head in his hands.  
  
There has to be more than this.  
  
\---  
  
One month down, three months to go.  
  
Mike stares at his sneakers as he walks toward the front doors at the end of another day.  
  
“What would _you_ do if you found out over the phone that your mother had just died?” Rachel asks whimsically, which earns her a few curious looks from a group of wayward sophomores or freshmen or something.  
  
“I’d be sorry natural causes got to her before I had a chance,” Katrina proclaims. Rachel laughs, and Mike wonders what’s wrong with them.  
  
No, it’s not their fault. He’s the one who hasn’t given them a reason.  
  
Still.  
  
“I’ll see you guys later,” Mike mutters, hanging back as they keep walking on toward the front doors.  
  
“What?” Rachel asks distractedly as Katrina frowns and says, “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah,” he dismisses, “just gotta check on something.”  
  
They take a few seconds to look back at him worriedly but don’t seem particularly inclined to wait, or push him any further; as he begins to turn around, they exchange a brief glance and continue on their way, and that’s the end of that.  
  
He only needs a second to collect himself, a second for the rushing sound in his ears to lower to a hum, to silence. Then he’ll go.  
  
Then he looks up, and the cacophony of voices rises to maniacal levels and abruptly drops to a murmur.  
  
Hey, Harvey. Fancy meeting you here.  
  
Mike raises his hand as if to wave and regrets it immediately.  
  
“Mister Specter.”  
  
Sticking his hand into the pocket of his dark jeans, Harvey nods slowly.  
  
“Mike.”  
  
They haven’t spoken, really, since that time after winter break, before the beginning of the end of the year. It’s Mike’s fault, he knows, but he isn’t exactly sure what he should have done differently. When was the moment of no turning back, the point of no return? Who can say. It doesn’t matter.  
  
“Do you have a minute?” Harvey asks, taking an angled step back and tilting his head toward the English hallway.  
  
You don’t have to do this.  
  
He does, so Mike nods, and off they go, back down the hall, back to the office Harvey shares with those two other English teachers Mike recognizes but doesn’t know. Back to the office where Harvey has a chair that he drapes his coat over when he takes it off, the office where Harvey has a desk that he sets his briefcase down underneath, the office where he closes the door as Mike stands off by himself and waits for a hint of what’s supposed to happen next, where do we go from here.  
  
“What’s wrong?”  
  
I don’t want to be alone.  
  
Mike shakes his head, _nothing,_ and Harvey frowns.  
  
“So you were waiting to talk to me about nothing?”  
  
“I wasn’t waiting to talk to you.”  
  
I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I swear.  
  
I was hoping.  
  
Harvey sighs. He yanks his chair away from his desk and shoves his coat to the side before he sits, and Mike fumbles for a second before he pulls out another teacher’s chair, and he sits, too.  
  
“Look, Mike, I know this isn’t easy.”  
  
“I’m just tired of feeling like a tourist, you know?”  
  
He doesn’t, it’s in his eyes, all over his face, he doesn’t. Mike is tempted to laugh at his own pretentiousness except that he really does mean it, maybe, and it would be nice to be taken seriously.  
  
“I’m just hanging around on the edges,” he says, “watching other people get what they want, watching them earn things for their hard work, watching them all struggle together and then make jokes about dying,” does this make any sense at all, I don’t know, I can’t tell, “and I know it’s all my fault, I know I’m getting what _I_ deserve for living the life I do, where everything that’s so hard for them is just—easy, all their problems seem so stupid, and I’m—I might as well be speaking another language.”  
  
“Mike…”  
  
Mike shrugs. It is what it is.  
  
Harvey smiles a bitter smile and looks down at his armrest as he folds his hands in his lap, and whatever comes next is going to be vitally important. Mike should pay attention.  
  
“Remember I told you I’m not really in touch with my family?” he asks, as though Mike would’ve forgotten. He nods, and Harvey looks up at the wall.  
  
“I was sixteen when I caught my mom cheating on my father.”  
  
This is your daily reminder that other people are hurting, too.  
  
Mike’s face must fall into a scowl or something because Harvey shakes his head— _hang on, hang on_ —and lowers his face, just a bit.  
  
“My dad’s a saxophone player, on the road a lot; he plays everywhere, with everyone, they all love him. He’s that kind of guy, he believes in the power of love at first sight and all that shit; the only problem with that is that his first sight was a groupie. And you know groupies,” he says, even though Mike doesn’t, “they’re diehard until they aren’t, they’ll never leave you until they do.”  
  
Mike bites his tongue, and Harvey shrugs.  
  
“Two years, I didn’t say a thing, whether I was trying to—spare him the embarrassment, or I thought my mom would come clean, or I could just pretend that if I didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t really happening, and all the while she just kept on making a fool of him, and I…”  
  
I didn’t stop it.  
  
I didn’t fix it.  
  
_I didn’t make it right._  
  
Crunching metal scrapes Mike’s eardrums, the imaginary sound of impact, the unfathomable sound of his world upending, the mangled sound of _I’m sorry I didn’t wake you, Michael, they didn’t make it to the hospital,_ and guilt squeezes his heart in a vice grip but he’s never felt closer to Harvey than he does right now, never felt more that they belong together, that the forces of good and evil and everything might’ve spent the last six years fucking him six ways from Sunday but someone’s trying to set things right now, trying to make it up to him.  
  
(Your timing is just awful.)  
  
They still haven’t managed to look each other in the eye, but Mike smiles to himself and hopes Harvey has the sense to take it for more than it is.  
  
“I missed talking to you.”  
  
A moment of silence passes before Harvey laughs tersely.  
  
“Not exactly what I was hoping you’d get out of that.”  
  
“That’s not what I meant,” Mike fumbles, but Harvey waves him off.  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” he assures him, rubbing his hand up and down Mike’s arm. “Look, I just wanted you to know that I understand what it’s like to be somewhere you’re supposed to belong and still feel like you’re alone.”  
  
Mike leans into Harvey’s hand without bothering to pretend it’s an accident. “You sound like a Lifetime Original movie,” he mutters, and Harvey grins.  
  
There is no time in this place; only images, the imprints of words.  
  
“We can still talk if you want.”  
  
We can, but we know it won’t be the same.  
  
Mike puts on the winningest smile he can manage and presses his hands down on his lap.  
  
“Thanks, Harvey.”  
  
Harvey nods.  
  
“You got this.”  
  
I sure do.  
  
\---  
  
On the Friday of the week before the start of spring break, the senior class has a half day that Katrina takes full advantage of by throwing a party to celebrate Rachel’s early acceptance to Columbia University, and Mike isn’t sure anyone invited him, but Katrina stops him on his way down the hall toward Computer Science class and says, “You’re coming to the party tonight, right?” so if he wasn’t before, he guesses he is now. He doesn’t know where Katrina’s house is, but that’s fine. When he gets home, he’ll check the school directory.  
  
The party, which was advertised to begin at seven, in fact starts closer to eight, and Mike spends the first thirty minutes sitting at one end of the living room couch not being spoken to. It’s a nice enough environment; everyone’s getting drunker and drunker, looser and more comfortable, and Mike could use a joint but he’s getting by alright without one.  
  
After about an hour, Claire Bowden flops down on the cushion beside him with a beer bottle in her hand and a sloppy smirk on her face.  
  
“You’re Mike Ross,” she says. Mike nods.  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“ _You,_ “ she accuses, pointing her beer bottle at his chest, “did _better_ than me, on the _midterm._ “  
  
He doesn’t know what her grade was, but if he remembers right, he got full marks, so, probably.  
  
“Sorry about that.”  
  
“We,” she carries on as though she hasn’t heard him, “should make out.”  
  
Interesting theory. She’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s a Type; he respects her drive, and under other circumstances, they definitely would’ve become friends. Maybe girlfriend and boyfriend, if she’s really interested and not just wasted off her ass.  
  
Might as well.  
  
They kiss for a little while at an awkward sort of angle before she climbs into his lap and plasters her hands on either side of his face, diving in for a more coordinated second round. It’s nice. It’s nice until Claire starts going at it like she’s forgotten they’re supposed to be working as a team, instead trying to conquer him, or possibly to eat him alive.  
  
He puts up with it until she gets bored, clambering off of him and tousling his hair as she sways her hips, dancing toward a crowd that’s bobbing along to music blasting out of a metallic silver semi-vintage boombox.  
  
Alright, well, that was fun.  
  
Back at home a few hours later, lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, waiting for sleep, he thinks he probably should have followed her into the crowd.  
  
That was never going to happen.  
  
\---  
  
On Thursday, the sixth day of spring break, Mike goes into the city to visit the coffee cart on the corner of Lexington and fifty-third where he can score some pretty good weed for the low price he’s in a position to pay. On the bus back to Queens, he tries to remember anything about the trip he just took and can’t, and wonders if that’s got anything to do with the fact that it’s started raining.  
  
As soon as he gets home, he runs up to his bedroom to call Trevor but hangs up after two rings and sits down on the floor.  
  
The microwave downstairs beeps loudly, and Mike listens for the click of the door being opened—there it is—and the firm clatter of its closing. For a second, the whole house smells like potatoes, and it’s almost dinnertime, but he isn’t really hungry.  
  
Mike takes the full bag of weed out of his pocket and shoves it in the back of his top desk drawer.  
  
\---  
  
“Have you been back to see Father Walker since you left Saint Andrew’s?” Grammy asks at breakfast on Sunday morning as she spreads jam across a piece of toast.  
  
What more is there to hear from him? Nothing he hasn’t said before, nothing Grammy won’t say in his stead.  
  
“No.”  
  
“You know, if you’re having any trouble, if there’s anything bothering you that you want to talk about, I’m sure he’d be there to listen.”  
  
“Nn-hng,” Mike grunts around a bite of Frosted Flakes.  
  
Grammy purses her lips. “Are you going to be seeing any of your friends before school starts up again?”  
  
Are you going to sit around the house like a bump on a log all week? Are you going to go out and get some air? Are you going to do anything with your life?  
  
Mike nods. “I’m meeting Rachel and Katrina in the park at ten.”  
  
“Oh, that’s nice.”  
  
Nice enough, considering the fact that Rachel and Katrina are vacationing in Florida for the week.  
  
Mike drinks down the sugary milk pooled in the bottom of his cereal bowl.  
  
“I’ll see you later.”  
  
“Have fun!”  
  
Muttering indifferently under the pretext of picking soggy cereal out from between his teeth, Mike waves over his shoulder and heads out the door. A walk in the park isn't the worst idea in the world; that sort of thing gives people clarity, right, and inspires creativity or some shit, and the park’s only about ten, fifteen minutes away.  
  
Mike looks down at his sneakers. Black spots of ground-in gum dot the wet sidewalk and a light snowfall hasn’t done much to wash away the smears of dog shit on the curb, and this is one hell of a life he’s got going.  
  
Ambling off the concrete path and into the trees, he kicks at the grass and wonders if actual hiking on a real mountain or a proper trail is anything like this. Yellow dandelions squash underfoot and he shoves spindly branches off to one side only to have them snap back in his stead, or break off if he pushes too hard and they’re too weak; the flurries cloud his vision and bead on his jacket but don’t seem to cling to his skin, and his mind is full of thoughts of nothing in particular, and probably no one would notice if he sat down on the far side of a big tree and didn’t get up for a good long while, which is so pathetic that he thinks he might start to cry.  
  
Not really, though. It’s not that big a deal.  
  
Mike thinks back to a time in his childhood when death was some abstract impossibility that only happened to other people. A nearby warbler sings a declaration that such a time never actually existed, that he’s just making it up to feel like he belongs, and he’d like to deny it but he isn’t sure he can.  
  
“Nice day, huh?”  
  
Mike’s shoulders jerk a little, but he covers his surprise with a cocky smirk.  
  
“If you’re into that sort of thing.”  
  
Harvey chuckles as they fall into step on a vaguely defined path through the dirt. Mike studies the way frost clings to the branches overhead.  
  
“What’re you doing here?”  
  
The wool of Harvey’s gloves is soft against Mike’s bare hands, a subtle touch as their arms swing side by side. Mike curls his little finger around Harvey’s, and Harvey clears his throat, but he doesn’t move away.  
  
“Believe it or not, you’re not the only one who lives within walking distance of the school.”  
  
Mike smiles. They’ve been together a lifetime, or only a few months. A few days, maybe a moment. Who can say? Who cares, really. Now is what’s important.  
  
If he believed that for real, maybe everything would be a little bit easier.  
  
“Two more months,” he says airily.  
  
Harvey puts his hands in his coat pockets.  
  
“What are you going to do then?”  
  
What then. Mike hardly knows what he’s doing right now.  
  
He shrugs. “I guess I’ll have to figure something out. My friend Trevor has some connections in the world of organized crime, so I figure I’ll be okay.”  
  
“Mike.”  
  
“Nah, you’re right, they’d never take a pothead like him.”  
  
Harvey sighs, seeming to take it for the joke Mike is pretty sure he meant it to be.  
  
“Well,” Harvey reflects, “you could sure do better than to turn into another me.”  
  
Mike tips his face up into the lightly falling snow, squinting at the blurry outline of the sun and crossing his arms over his chest. Better than striking out on his own, forging a path completely separate from the one everyone seems intent on driving him down, making his own way even if it isn’t easy, if it isn’t straightforward? Can he do better than that? Can he really?  
  
Would he?  
  
It isn’t perfect, but it’s good.  
  
Harvey bumps their shoulders together, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye.  
  
“What are you looking it?”  
  
Mike’s steps slow until he stops walking, blinking a few times as he lowers his gaze back to the horizon.  
  
“There was a bird.”  
  
A bird.  
  
Behind Mike, on a barren branch, a sparrow alights, turning its head this way and that, hopping and fluttering its wings against the cold. The city sleeps, the streets and the parks and everything in between as the snowfall begins to slow to a stop and the cloud cover begins to fade away.  
  
Harvey leans forward to lay his hand on Mike’s cheek and kiss him softly.  
  
“You’re a special guy, Mike.”  
  
Mike smiles as they continue walking.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
They walk under the powdered branches and the little birds, the grey sky and the barest of flurries, turning by mutual agreement whenever the paved road comes into view. The hour ticks closer to eleven and the temperature begins to rise, just slightly, and Mike takes his hand out of his pockets to touch Harvey’s again.  
  
“So are you.”  
  
Harvey threads their fingers together and squeezes tight.  
  
\---  
  
“Did you have a nice time with your friends?”  
  
Mike steps out of his wet sneakers and hangs his jacket in the hall closet.  
  
“They said to say hi.”  
  
Grammy smiles and nods.  
  
“Dinner will be ready in about half an hour.”  
  
Where has the time gone?  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Wasn’t there supposed to be something more than this?  
  
Maybe later.  
  
\---  
  
“So happy birthday,” Rachel says as she slides into her desk chair and pulls a notebook out of her backpack.  
  
Mike doodles a few more laps on the circle he’s etching into the plastic cover of his binder.  
  
“I didn’t know it was your birthday,” Katrina chimes in as she sits beside Rachel. “Happy birthday!”  
  
This is May. Mike checks his wristwatch. May eighth; so it is.  
  
All right then.  
  
“Are you doing anything?” Rachel asks.  
  
Mike shrugs.  
  
“If I’d known, I would’ve gotten you a present,” Katrina laments.  
  
Mike shakes his head.  
  
“It’s fine.”  
  
It’s one forty, is what it is. Harvey gets up from his desk to shut the door and Mike puts his pen down as they prepare for the next forty-five minute interval of pretending to care about whatever’s on the syllabus today, this unfortunate day at the end of the year after they’ve all stopped particularly paying attention to the code of conduct, beginning instead to plan for their summer vacations and fantasize about how they’re going to decorate their new college dorm rooms come September.  
  
Mike needs to replace the lightbulb in Grammy’s closet.  
  
Because he’s not an idiot, Harvey waits for them to stop gossiping before he tries to interject, asking the class at large their overall opinions of _Waiting for Godot_ and letting them off the leash to have what may or may not be a particularly relevant discussion. Mike picks up his pen again and returns to the circle on his binder cover until the plastic starts to tear, at which point he rests his chin in his palm and fixes his gaze on Harvey, hoping anyone who happens to look his way will think he’s staring off into space.  
  
The wall clock is stuck at 11:07.  
  
The bell rings.  
  
“Mike, can I speak to you a minute?”  
  
Rachel and Katrina stumble in gathering up their books to look over at him nervously, and Mike hopes he hasn’t exaggerated his exasperated expression and slouching posture so much that they’ll want to ask him about it later. Katrina pats him sympathetically on the shoulder as she passes, and maybe that’ll be the end of it.  
  
Harvey presses his palm against the edge of his desk and sits back in his chair as Mike approaches.  
  
“So.”  
  
Kyle sneaks a delightedly smug glance back at him before he leaves, making sure door thumps loudly when he closes it behind him.  
  
“So,” Mike repeats with a little smile that Harvey meets with a grimace. Mike nervously presses his lips together as Harvey shakes his head.  
  
“You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”  
  
What?  
  
The corner of Harvey’s mouth quirks at Mike’s puzzlement and he leans forward.  
  
“Happy birthday.”  
  
There is that. Mike looks away reservedly.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“Hey,” Harvey murmurs. “You okay? Because I’ll take it back if you want me to.”  
  
Mike smiles at him. “No, sorry; thank you. Thanks.”  
  
Harvey keeps watching him, and Mike bites his lip.  
  
“I didn’t mean to keep it a secret or anything,” he rambles, “it’s just that I don’t really remember my birthday, most of the time. I mean, I know it’s May eighth, but I don’t really pay attention to it.” He shrugs, wondering if this is something he should be embarrassed about.  
  
_How can you forget your own birthday? Wow, that’s so weird. Are you, like…okay? Just wait until you get a little older and you’ll start forgetting all sorts of things!_  
  
Mike’s heard it all before, and he braces himself to hear it again until he remembers that this is Harvey, who’s better than that. Harvey, who takes him at his word, who merely folds his hands in front of his face and nods; Harvey, who makes Mike more content than he’s been in a long time.  
  
“So I’m guessing you’re not exactly walking around with a wish list in your back pocket.”  
  
Mike smirks. “Not exactly.”  
  
Harvey lays his hands on the desk and looks up at Mike critically. “Is there anything you want?”  
  
“An A for the semester?” Mike ponders. Harvey rolls his eyes.  
  
“You’re already getting an A this semester.”  
  
“Oh, well then, mission accomplished.”  
  
“Mike.”  
  
Ducking his head, Mike tries to hide his smile.  
  
(Thank you for this brief indulgence.)  
  
_Is there anything you want?_  
  
There’s the obvious stuff, of course; every variant of “I want my parents to not be dead,” “I want things to be better than they are,” et cetera and so on. “I’d like to have a sense of purpose.” The thing is, though, that while having his parents back would be great, obviously, and having a goal or a path or whatever might be helpful in the long run, Mike is hard pressed at the moment to ask that his life be anything too wildly divergent from what it already is.  
  
But actually, now that you mention it…  
  
“I want to tell you something.”  
  
Harvey furrows his brow. “Yeah, of course.”  
  
This is the weight of a thousand years of stunning works of art. The soft tranquility of peacefully controlled suffering.  
  
Mike fixes his gaze to Harvey’s.  
  
“I love you.”  
  
Harvey doesn’t inhale sharply, and he doesn’t jerk away, and his eyes don’t widen to the size of dinner plates. Nor does he seem to know quite what to say, but then, that wasn’t really the point.  
  
Mike smiles.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
It was everything I could’ve hoped.  
  
\---  
  
Around two o’clock on Saturday, Mike abruptly becomes so drowsy that he’s unable to focus long enough to read even a single sentence of _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_ , which he picked up for ten bucks at his local Barnes & Noble shortly after the start of the semester but never quite got around to for some reason. Squeezing his eyes shut, he shakes his head violently and opens them again, zeroing in for some reason on the words “Hope regulars.”  
  
“Michael!”  
  
What was that?  
  
“Michael,” Grammy calls again, and Mike drops the book on his bed as he stumbles out his bedroom door to jog down the stairs.  
  
“Yeah,” he replies as he nears the living room where Grammy’s flipping through magazines and probably some bills, holding an envelope in her free hand.  
  
“This is for you,” she says.  
  
His name is printed in a vaguely familiar handwriting, but there’s no return address, a stamp but no postmark, as though the author planned to mail it and then had second thoughts; Mike fits his finger under the back flap and tears it open on his way back up the stairs, extracting a single sheet of paper folded neatly into thirds and creased sharply along the edges.  
  
_Me too_ , it reads. No signature.  
  
“Me too”? What the fuck kind of practical joke is this?  
  
Mike pinches the bridge of his nose and bumps his shoulder on the doorframe on the way back into his room.  
  
_Fuck._  
  
“Me too,” “me too,” “me too.”  
  
Do you?  
  
Mike picks up the envelope and squints at the handwritten address.  
  
_Me too._  
  
You too?  
  
Mike sits on his bed and stares at the letters as though they’re about to begin speaking to him, but it’s not until he drops his hands into his lap and leans back to look up at the ceiling that— Well, he’s always found the phrase “hit me like a freight train” to be obscenely overused, but then, he’s never exactly experienced it for himself before now.  
  
_I love you._  
  
_Me too._  
  
Mike raises the letter up over his head and falls back against his pillows.  
  
Harvey, you magnificent bastard.  
  
\---  
  
The twenty-one days between Mike’s birthday and graduation day alternately crawl at a pace so agonizingly slow that Mike is convinced they’ll never end, and fly at such a rate that he’s hard pressed to believe they’re happening at all. Maybe it’s all just a series of poorly-constructed hallucinations, maybe none of this is real.  
  
Yeah, okay, Mike. Whatever you say.  
  
Ross, Michael James sits in the middle of the third row of graduating seniors, a comfortable position for zoning out on the paint-drying, grass-growingly boring commencement speech as well as about seventy-two percent of the rest of the pomp and circumstance. Non-seniors have the day off from school, on account of the number of teachers required to attend the ceremony, but being that he isn’t the head of his department, Harvey doesn’t share in the obligation to show up, the lucky sonofabitch. Mike feels bad for Grammy, who’s around here somewhere, probably keeping herself occupied counting down the minutes to his turn.  
  
He wonders how many of his soon-to-be-former peers are taking a year off before college, how many are doing it by choice versus how many weren’t accepted to any of the schools where they applied. There have to be a few; what are they going to do with themselves? Do any of them have any advice? Graduates still backpack around Europe, don’t they, maybe he could try that.  
  
Yeah, okay, Mike. You wanna try that one again?  
  
No, not really, thank you.  
  
As he picks at the navy blue padding of his stadium seat, his minds begins to wander, ambling here and there through the forest of memories he’s collected over the years, but it’s not until Mike notices his thoughts begin to circle around to Harvey that he snaps his attention back to the dreary play in front of him. There’s no point in sitting here working himself into a fit over what’s going to happen to “them” after he graduates; no point in wondering how quickly Harvey will forget about him, how completely they’ll be cut out of each other’s lives, how strict the rules will be to never contact each other again.  
  
Mike nearly slaps himself.  
  
_Stop it._  
  
“Michael James Ross.”  
  
But I didn’t—  
  
Oh, right.  
  
Mike sidles out of the emptying row and walks up onto the auditorium stage, hoping to strike a balance between the indifference he feels and the accomplishment he’s meant to be exuding as he shakes Principal Pearson’s hand and accepts his diploma. Taking his place in the crowd of seniors now too large to fit entirely offstage, Mike turns his rolled diploma this way and that, vainly attempting to read his own name through the back of the thick paper; when that stops being even mildly amusing, he turns his attention to the audience, trying to guess which families belongs to Rachel and Katrina and telling himself he’s probably right despite having absolutely no evidentiary support.  
  
There’s Grammy in the front row, her attention focused on him shuffling his feet despite the minor racket of the remaining students filing up for their diplomas. She smiles at him and he smiles back, averting his eyes as quickly as he can without seeming too overtly disrespectful but before it becomes awkward.  
  
There’s Harvey in the back, leaning against the door with his arms crossed over his chest.  
  
There’s—  
  
Wait.  
  
Harvey tips a two-finger salute when Mike’s eyes land on him, but Mike’s brain isn’t remotely equipped to handle this at the moment, so he ends up just dropping his arms at his sides and standing still right where he is.  
  
_Me too._  
  
Zane, Rachel Elizabeth receives her diploma last, without additional fanfare, and Mike doesn’t follow directions so much as allow himself to be swept along by the crowd into position for the senior class photo, leaving the stage when everyone else does and meeting Grammy halfway when she starts to walk toward him. He’s having something of a hard time focusing on anything in particular.  
  
“Are you alright, Michael, you look ill.”  
  
Huh?  
  
“I’m fine,” he says, smiling as wide as he can until she thins her lips skeptically and he remembers that she’s been there since the beginning of all of it. “It’s…you know. It’s a big day.”  
  
Grammy nods, and her amused glance over his shoulder is the only warning Mike receives before Rachel throws herself across his back, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and nearly knocking him down.  
  
“Mike!” she calls over the din, right in his ear, making him wince sharply as Katrina appears in front of him to drag Rachel back down to the ground.  
  
“Hey Rachel,” he replies, barely noticing Grammy’s sly wink as she steps back to make room for his friends. He feels the need to explain himself, or to explain them, but he isn’t sure how, or why.  
  
“I’m going to _Columbia!_ ” Rachel cries as though the news is remotely new. Mike nods.  
  
“Congratulations,” he plays along as though he’s still interested.  
  
“No, you don’t understand,” she implores. “When people ask me where I go to school, I can say I go to _Columbia University._ ”  
  
“Yeah, I know,” he says, patting her on the shoulder as she laughs giddily and Katrina grabs her around the waist in an awkwardly intimate embrace.  
  
“You’re going to be amazing,” Katrina promises.  
  
“So are you!” Rachel says. “We’re right across the street, we’ll talk all the time.”  
  
“You’re going to Barnard?” Mike guesses as Katrina tries to regulate her own proud smile. “I didn’t know that.”  
  
“We’re going to dominate the entire campus,” Katrina proclaims, which is pretty unlikely and makes Mike wonder how confident she’s really feeling about the future.  
  
This is your daily reminder that other people are frightened, too.  
  
“Oh hey,” Rachel says abruptly, “do you think there’s any way we could room together? Like a college exchange thing?”  
  
Katrina’s eyes light up, and Mike feels himself being forgotten as they put their heads together and speculate about their futures, composing intricate plans that are sure to fall through in dramatic fashion. Turning back, he opens his mouth to ask Grammy if she wants to leave, or if she would mind if he left, because—  
  
Fuck.  
  
Did he really expect this _not_ to happen?  
  
At the back of the auditorium, just inside the door, Harvey smiles warmly as Grammy leans in for a conspiratorial whisper and Mike can only imagine what she might be saying as he hopes and prays with all his might that he isn’t even close to guessing correctly. Making a low-pitched noise that he hopes will be mistaken for the word “Goodbye,” he leaves Rachel and Katrina to their plotting, spinning and sidestepping his way to the auditorium doors as he tries to smile as though everything is fine.  
  
“Sorry about that,” he says the instant Grammy finishes her sentence, whatever it was. “Rachel and Katrina are, uh, pretty excited about graduating.”  
  
“It’s no trouble,” Grammy assures him. “I had a chance to catch up with Mister Specter here, he tells me you two have had some very interesting discussions this semester.”  
  
Mike’s vision blanks for a panicked second, but Harvey just smiles at him.  
  
“Most students end up resorting to the Cliffs Notes for _Catch-22_ ,” he explains. “I was telling your grandmother how nice it is to have a student who actually knows what he’s talking about, but that’s nothing she didn’t hear back in March.”  
  
March?  
  
“Parent-teacher conference day,” Grammy chides at his vacant expression, “you had a half day, you remember, your friend Katrina was having that party, I was stuck in here for hours. But of course Mister Specter had some quite lovely things to say about you.”  
  
“Oh, oh, yeah,” Mike agrees as though he had any idea that had happened, as though he’d paid any attention. As though he didn’t hear about it at the time and forget it for precisely this reason, which is as good a guess as any.  
  
Grammy slides her coat over her shoulders, mostly so she doesn’t have to carry it anymore.  
  
Harvey puts his fist in front of his mouth and clears his throat.  
  
“Um.”  
  
They both turn to Mike as though their necks are spring-loaded, quietly desperate for a break in the tension, an excuse to return their trio to any version of a simple pair. Pursing his lips and looking somewhere in the vicinity of both of their faces, Mike smiles uncomfortably.  
  
“Uh, Mister Specter, can I talk to you?” he asks, raising his eyes to meet Harvey’s at the very last moment. Harvey and Grammy both seem taken aback at the request, though it’s difficult to tell exactly why, whether either of them is putting on a show, and Mike holds Harvey’s gaze as he waits them out.  
  
“Sure,” Harvey says. “Missus Ross, it’s been very nice to see you again.”  
  
“Yes, you too, Mister Specter,” Grammy replies, reaching out to shake his hand. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for my grandson.”  
  
Mike looks at Harvey perplexedly, but he just smiles.  
  
He’s good at this.  
  
“Michael?” Harvey prompts, putting his hand on the door handle at his back. As Mike goes to follow him out, Grammy makes her way to the last row of auditorium seats and rests with her hands in her coat pockets.  
  
The door falls shut. Ch-clunk.  
  
Mike takes a deep breath, and Harvey puts his hand on his shoulder.  
  
Okay. Everything is okay.  
  
“You know you’re gonna be fine, right?”  
  
Mike looks down at his dress shoes and tries to believe it.  
  
“I guess I never thought about what would happen after I graduated.”  
  
It might be an accident, or it might be a reflex, or it might be on purpose, but Harvey slides his hand to the side of Mike’s neck and gently presses the pads of his fingers to the space behind his ear, and Mike leans into his touch.  
  
“No one really knows what they want to do with their lives after high school.”  
  
“I know I don’t want to stop seeing you.”  
  
It’s a nasty, selfish thing to say, and he did it without really thinking it through, but there’s not much point in pretending it isn’t true. Harvey deserves to know, that’s why he said it, why he blurted it out, because it’s Harvey’s choice now to do whatever he thinks is best. Harvey’s job to say no, to say “It’s been fun, but.”  
  
Of course, Harvey’s never exactly been one for convention.  
  
“We’re not exactly dating,” Harvey says with a quirk of his lips, and Mike frowns.  
  
“Like hell we aren’t.”  
  
Harvey drops his hand, but he’s still smiling. Mike glares at him.  
  
“Depends on your definition of ‘dating,’” Harvey compromises. “But come on, Mike, I’m not good for you and you know it. I’m not planning on keeping this job much longer and I have no idea where I’m going to end up next, and you deserve someone who’s not such a goddamn loser.”  
  
“You’re not a loser,” Mike counters immediately, his eyes narrowing. “But are you telling me you never meant for this to last? Because you know what, you could’ve told me we never really had a shot, that it was all gonna be done at the end of the year. You could’ve _warned_ me.”  
  
“No, I—” Harvey stops himself short and Mike is glad he didn’t rise to the bait, glad he’s going to get an actual explanation.  
  
“Mike, look, I didn’t really think about what was going to happen after graduation, either.” Harvey turns away shamefacedly, visibly forcing himself to look back at Mike before he starts up again. “That was my fault, and I’m sorry. And it’s—it’s not that I don’t want to be with you, god knows I do. But you deserve someone who can give you anything you want, you deserve someone who can treat you the way you ought to be treated, and that’s not me.”  
  
Like hell it isn’t.  
  
Mike puts his hands on Harvey’s biceps, pinning him in place, and stares right into his eyes.  
  
“Do you know what would happen to me if someone suddenly came along and gave me everything I asked for?” he asks lowly. “Do you know what would happen? I’ll tell you what would happen, I would be _lost._ I would be so lost, I would be _so_ confused. I would _die._ ” Leaning back just a touch, he pauses, and then:  
  
“And you know what, I think I just figured out what I want to do after graduation.”  
  
Harvey arches his eyebrows. “Epiphany?” he asks wryly. Mike smirks.  
  
“I want to spend the next year,” he says, “or two years, or however long it takes, figuring out what I want to do, not just after high school, but with the rest of my life, and I want to work my ass off to make it happen. And I want to do it with someone who’s willing to take the time to figure out what he wants and fight for it, somebody who won’t settle for the easy answer just because it’s there. I want to do it with you.”  
  
A whole world of possibilities is out there, just waiting to be discovered, a whole world that he’s heard about but never seen, never entirely believed. It would be nice to find out such a place was real.  
  
For a minute, nothing happens.  
  
For a terrifying, heart-dropping minute, Harvey doesn’t say a word, doesn’t make a sound, and Mike knows with everything he is that he’s made a terrible, irrevocable mistake.  
  
For a minute stalled in time, Mike is back exactly where he started, and he’ll keep going forward because he has to, but he’ll be walking that path alone.  
  
Then Harvey’s eyes dart up, left and right down the vacant hallway, and he leans in to steal a hasty kiss, drawing back with a modest little smile.  
  
“I think about you a lot,” Harvey confides.  
  
Mike drops his arms and grins.  
  
“And I’ll tell you what else,” he goes on, “this place will be boring as hell without you around to talk to.” Pressing his lips together and looking around again, he nods contemplatively. “You know what, I’m pretty sure I could do better.”  
  
Impulsively, Mike reaches up to grab Harvey’s face in his hands and kiss him again.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Harvey smooths his hand over Mike’s shoulder as he moves away.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
There’s more to it than that, Mike feels it in the air between them; sure enough, Harvey furrows his brow and glances over at the auditorium doors.  
  
“What do you want to tell you grandmother?” he asks carefully, and Mike is going to have to start thinking a few steps ahead if this is going to work out in the long term. He turns to look as well, to the doors still closed but beginning to sound with graduates and parents eager to get on with their celebrations and whatnot. A subtle reminder that this is very nice and all but there are a lot of other factors to take into consideration.  
  
“Nothing?” he suggests. “I mean eventually, I guess, probably, but maybe not right now.”  
  
Harvey nods. “I think that’s probably for the best.”  
  
Mike murmurs a quiet sound, laying his hand on the door handle and pressing down.  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Grammy is still sitting in the last row of auditorium seating when they head back in, though she turns at the sound of their entrance, smiling widely when Mike leans down to kiss her cheek.  
  
“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me,” she chides. “Now, Michael, it’s nearly six thirty, where do you want to go for dinner?”  
  
It’s the simplest question in the world. Mike should’ve seen it coming. He did, too, in an abstract sort of way, and it shouldn’t floor him, it shouldn’t throw him so off his game. And it doesn’t, exactly, it’s just that going out to dinner means going away from Harvey, and it’s not that they’ve been able to spend much time alone together, ever, or that he was really expecting them to commemorate his graduation together, but he was hoping…  
  
He doesn’t know what he thought was going to happen.  
  
Harvey puts his hands in his pockets.  
  
“Thai?” Mike suggests vaguely.  
  
Grammy pinches her lips together at his indifference.  
  
“Well, it’s whatever you like,” she says.  
  
Mike rolls his shoulders a bit, not quite a shrug but close enough.  
  
Harvey clears his throat.  
  
“Congratulations again, Mike,” he says with a perfunctory smile. “It’s been a real treat getting to know you this year.”  
  
And it’s a beautiful thing for him to say, really it is. It’s kind and it’s charming and it’s traditional, the sort of thing parents expect to hear from teachers about their kids. The thing is, though, that it’s so insipidly predictable, so depressingly inane that Mike has to stop whatever he’s doing and make sure he’s talking to who he thinks he’s talking to, double check that those words really came from Harvey, the guy he could’ve sworn he knew better than that.  
  
Grammy looks up at Mike like she’s concerned he’s begun to come apart at the seams.  
  
“You two have a nice dinner,” Harvey says, bending slightly from the waist in a way that might be mistaken for a bow, and Mike remembers that this is how the act works in public, this is how things have to look from the outside.  
  
“Weh,” he replies, uncertain of what he was trying to say and how he could have failed so badly.  
  
Grammy stands and begins to button her coat.  
  
“Is there anything else you need to take care of before we go?” she asks pointedly.  
  
Mike looks at Harvey.  
  
No. No, I guess not.  
  
“See you,” he says, which immediately makes him feel like an idiot for any number of reasons, but Harvey smiles like he thinks it’s cute, and Grammy doesn’t seem to mind.  
  
“Bye, Mike.”  
  
By accident, they all three walk out the doors together, but Harvey takes a left, even though the front doors are to the right, and Mike and Grammy make it all the way outside before she puts her hand on his arm.  
  
“I like that one,” she says as they walk down the steps. “I can see why he’s your favorite.”  
  
What? What? I didn’t say anything, I didn’t, now isn’t—what?  
  
“He was your favorite teacher, wasn’t he?” she prods as he struggles for words.  
  
Oh, right. Oh, that.  
  
“Yeah,” he agrees.  
  
Even though sunset isn’t for another hour or so, about half of the streetlamps along the sidewalk are already on, giving everything not quite the same but a very similar gauzy effect to the one that they’ll cast a few hours from now, in the blue light of dawn, and Mike can already see the moon perched over Manhattan, off in the distance. He and Grammy walk together rather slowly, and it occurs to Mike, for the first time in a long time, that maybe things don’t have to be quite as bad as they seem. Maybe it’s more than just a stupid platitude, maybe everything really is going to turn out all right in the end.  
  
The light isn’t particularly bright, but it’s more than enough to see by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Homophobia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic were rampant in the late 1990s, but the initial barrier to Mike and Harvey’s relationship is that they’re student and teacher. (The age of consent in [New York State](http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article263.htm) is 17; even though they didn’t have sex while Mike was in high school, their relationship was legal either way, but for optics purposes, Harvey would probably have been fired if anyone found out.)
> 
> Ulysses S. Grant High School isn’t a real place.
> 
> The first edition of _Catch-22_ is 453 pages long. The soldier in white (“white” referring to a full body cast, not clothing) represents not purity but the way the military obliterates individuals’ identities and makes them essentially interchangeable objects.
> 
>  _Gravity’s Rainbow_ is 760 pages long and infamously difficult to understand. The epigraph of Part 1, “Beyond the Zero,” is a quote by Wernher von Braun: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
> 
> The sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Boston was exposed in 2002, so Harvey’s accusation that something must have happened to prompt Mike to abruptly transfer out of Catholic school wouldn’t have had quite such a knee-jerk connotation in 1997.
> 
>  _The Stranger_ begins with the protagonist, Meursault, finding that his mother, who lives in a nursing home and with whom he hasn’t had much contact recently, has died, and reacting with total indifference.
> 
> In-state [tuition and fees](http://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-fees) at CUNY Queens College for the 1998-‘99 semester was $3,392 while SUNY colleges, by and large, ranged from approximately $3,700 to $4,200; Harvard’s tuition, not including room and board, was $24,407.
> 
> According to his [driver’s license](https://ivorykaleidoscope.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/mikes-license.jpg), Mike’s birthday is May 8th.
> 
> “Michael, we both know how smart you are, but there’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom.”  
> —Father Walker, “[Faith](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e10)“ (s05e10)
> 
> “You’re right,” Yossarian shouted back. “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”  
> — _Catch-22_
> 
> What were we supposed to understand about each other in ten minutes? What can two people understand about each other in ten minutes?  
> — _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_
> 
> “You seem to live in this deluded world where you think that you can always win. But sometimes you can’t. Bad things happen. You’ve got to face the fact that life is going to be this case or this case or this case. Jessica lost. You lost. And there isn’t anything that any of us, including the great and powerful Harvey Specter, can do about it.”  
> —Mike, “[High Noon](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s02e10)” (s02e10)
> 
> “Hell is—other people!”  
> — _No Exit_
> 
> “He was a saxophone player. He sat in with everybody because everybody loved him. He believed in love at first sight. Unfortunately his first sight was a groupie.”  
> “Your mother.”  
> “I was 16 when I caught her cheating. I knew if I told my dad, he’d— The next two years went by, I didn’t say a thing, and she went right on just—making him a fool. Look, this is all to say that I lived in a house surrounded by family, but I know what it’s like to be totally alone.”  
> —Harvey and Mike, “[High Noon](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s02e10)” (s02e10)
> 
> “What are you looking for?”  
> “Another me.”  
> —Donna and Harvey, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> Beckett, S. (1954). _Waiting for Godot_. New York, NY: Grove Press.  
>  Camus, A. (1946). _The Stranger_. United Kingdom: Hamish Hamilton Limited.  
>  Heller, J. (1961). _Catch-22_. New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction.  
>  Murakami, H. (1997). _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_. New York, NY: Vintage Books.  
>  Pynchon, T. (1973). _Gravity’s Rainbow_. New York, NY: Viking Press.  
>  Sartre, J. P. (1958). _No Exit_. New York, NY: Samuel French, Inc.  
>  Stoppard, T. (1967). _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_. London: Faber and Faber.  
>  Sun Tzu (1963). _The Art of War_. (S. B. Griffith, Trans.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Original work published 5th century BC)


	2. Epilogue

**1998**

**September**

“Did you know that the same law that prohibits people from shooting each other makes it illegal to force someone to compete in a bike race for eight hours straight?”

Harvey looks up from his desk and removes the capped tip of the pen he’s biting down on from his mouth. “No, but I’m more interested in the fact that you _do_ know that.”

Mike holds up the weighty black binder he’s flipping through to show off the words PENAL LAW, printed across the cover in gold embossing. “Summer beach read.”

“Right, of course.”

Nestling back on Harvey’s couch, Mike props the binder back open on his knees and flips idly to Article 485, Hate Crimes, as he tries to focus his meandering trains of thought to a single track. Back in middle school, his class took a field trip to some science museum where they had a shelf of brains in jars, supposedly preserved in some kind of liquid that Trevor claimed was just water because the brains were obviously plastic even though Mike wasn’t so sure; maybe if Mike could take a look at his own brain, poke around in there with a scalpel and electrons and shit, he would have an easier time figuring out what it is he really wants.

“What’re you doing?” he asks as he turns the page. S 120.12 Aggravated assault upon a person less than eleven years old.

He turns the page again.

“Donna’s applying to BMCC,” Harvey says. “Someone told her an Administrative Assistant Certification could help her with her next salary negotiation, so she asked me to look over her application. I mean, personally, I don’t see the connection, but if she wants to put in the time and the money, I’m not going to stop her.”

“BMCC accepts everybody,” Mike mutters, picking at the corner of the binder where the cover is glued down.

Harvey hums noncommittally and starts tapping his pen. There’s a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in a box underneath the coffee table that Mike is pretty sure Harvey received as a gift from someone who didn’t know him very well; the completed puzzle depicts a cresting wave that he’s seen before in a stock photo montage.

Way back in October of his senior year, Miss Paulsen suggested that he look into a degree in Psychology if he wanted to help people, or Social Work, except the idea of being paid to give other people advice on figuring out how to get their lives together makes him feel like a fraud.

Mike closes the binder and looks down at the thick gold print.

Aggravated assault on a person _less than eleven years old._

“Hey, Harvey.”

“Yeah.”

Mike turns the binder over and traces his finger around the gold embossed edge.

“What do you think about me maybe trying to become a lawyer?”

Harvey scribbles a note on Donna’s application. “I think you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I.” Harvey sets his pen down and turns in his chair to face Mike, resting his elbows on his knees that way he does when he wants to have a serious discussion. “You want to be a lawyer, I think that’s fantastic, let’s look into it.”

Mike flinches a little, not really enough to notice, not enough to cause alarm, but of course Harvey does notice, and he’s a good person, and he loves Mike, and this isn’t about him, it isn’t.

Dropping his head, Harvey sighs. Mike wants to hug him.

“Sorry,” Harvey says. He looks up again with a smile only slightly strained. “I think it’s a great idea, I think you’d be great at it. How can I help?”

Laying the binder on the coffee table, Mike crawls to the edge of the couch and reaches out for Harvey to inch his chair closer and lean over for a kiss.

“I have to go home,” Mike says when they part, “but tomorrow I wanna go to the library and start looking into it.”

Harvey nods, ruffling Mike’s hair and earning a haphazard swat for his trouble.

“Your grandmother will be thrilled.”

Mike grins.

“You’ve got your priorities in order.”

\---

Grammy’s clearing the table after dinner when Mike springs it on her. He’s tempted to say he doesn’t know why he waited, but there’s no one to lie to here inside his head.

“A lawyer,” she repeats. “Well, that’s an interesting thought, I didn’t know you were interested in law. Of course I’ll support you if you really want to, but, you know, this is a big commitment.”

“It’s seven years of school, total,” Mike admits. “But I bet I can do it in less.”

She murmurs to herself, and Mike stands with his plate held in both hands.

“Something wrong?” he asks as his fingers tighten around the ceramic and leftover mashed sweet potato oozes under his nails.

“Oh no,” she says quickly, “no, it’s just an awful lot. But I think this is wonderful, this is a wonderful idea.”

Mike scrapes his plate off into the garbage. “Thanks.”

He’s not an idiot, he’s not a blind fool; he hears the words she isn’t saying, the disbelief lurking in the back of her throat. You sure are turning your life around awfully quickly, Michael; you sure are setting the bar awfully high, Michael; are you sure you’ll be able to handle it, Michael? Sure you won’t fall back on old habits, sure you’ll stay on the straight and narrow, sure you’ll find enough money in between the couch cushions and underneath the refrigerator to last you seven whole years?

For a second, he thinks about telling her about Harvey, but it’s been a pretty heavy night already, and there’s no need to pile that on.

Up in his room, Mike sits down at his desk and opens _Best 311 Colleges, 1998 Edition_ , flipping straight to “20 Tips for Getting Financial Aid.”

He’ll handle it.

\---

“I’m just saying, BMCC has a pre-law program.”

“Go to hell.”

Harvey turns the book he’s reading upside down and shoves it across the table toward Mike, who glances at the word “Princeton” and immediately turns back to his own research. “If you want to have any chance of getting into a brand-name school,” Harvey cautions, tapping the page he wants Mike to read, “you’re going to need some AP credits.”

Mike rests his chin in his palm. “I can get those without taking the classes? Or being a student?”

“The classes don’t actually count for anything, they’re just to prepare you for the exam.”

“The American education system at work.”

Harvey smirks. “I’ll talk to Jessica about getting you on the list.”

Yeah, everything will be fine. Probably. Sure, he’ll read the study guides, take a few practice tests, it’ll be a breeze.

It’ll be easy, everything will be fine.

“Maybe I can even graduate early.”

Harvey arches his eyebrows. “Planning your law school curriculum already?”

Don’t put the cart before the horse, Michael.

It’s good of Harvey not to give him a bye on every little flight of fancy, but a snide voice in the back of his head pipes up then to remind him of Grammy’s lukewarm reaction last night, to ask him whether anyone really thinks he has a shot at success. Whether they’re secretly waiting for him to fail on his own so they can turn up their noses and point and jeer that they told him so.

They wouldn’t. No, they wouldn’t.

“I’ve got a few other things to figure out first.”

Harvey nods, and they both go back to their books.

“You know what,” Harvey muses after awhile, tipping up the volume in front of him to show Mike the full title of the publishing house, “The Princeton Review,” “this actually looks pretty interesting. Being a lawyer isn’t just about going to court or defending murderers; corporate law is all about strategic mergers, delegation of company management and things.”

“No one’d get anything by you,” Mike agrees. Then Harvey’s words make it all the way from his ears to his brain and he looks up with a jolt.

“Hang on.”

“Hm.”

Mike narrows his eyes, pressing his hands down on the books in front of him as Harvey looks up bemusedly.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Mike smirks. “I know that tone.”

Glancing down at the Review as though it’ll give him a hint, Harvey leans back a ways, even though the table is too wide for Mike to reach him without standing up.

“What tone?”

“That ‘I have to pretend like Mike didn’t have a brilliantly life-changing idea that I’m going to figure out how to copy without letting him know’ tone.”

Harvey rolls his eyes. “You’re out of your damn mind.”

Leaning back in his chair, Mike arches his eyebrows and shrugs as he returns to his books.

“Whatever you say, dude.”

“Don’t call me ‘dude.’”

“You got it, jerk.”

Harvey kicks him under the table, and Mike smiles as he pretends to concentrate.

\---

**1999**

**May**

Two hundred and eighty-eight hours.

For two hundred and eighty-eight hours, Mike’s life has been just about entirely consumed by AP exam prep books, AP exam drills, one last-minute phone call to the College Board, and twenty-five hours of actually taking the fucking things, and now, it’s finally done, and all he wants is a bottle of Advil. And a bottle of beer. And to sleep for a week.

He’d do it, too, if not for the fact that loitering out in front of Bayside High is none other than Harvey Specter, pretending to read _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ for probably the hundredth time as he patiently waits for Mike to notice him, and he’s better than Advil or beer or any of that other crap.

Mike shoves his hands in his pockets and squints up at the sky as he ambles over.

“Nice day, huh?”

Harvey smirks, closing the book without bothering to mark his place.

“If you’re into that sort of thing.”

It takes a lot of effort for Mike to keep his eyes open, but he knows it’s not the best idea to fall asleep in the middle of a parking lot.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks, which seems to surprise Harvey for some reason. It shouldn’t; they haven’t seen each other all month, not since that begrudgingly mutual decision that it would be better for Mike to concentrate all his energy not spent caring for his grandmother on prepping for his APs and diving intensively into his college search. Mike wasn’t even sure Harvey knew where he was taking his exams, though in hindsight, it makes sense that Jessica would have told him.

“I can’t be the first one to say congratulations?” Harvey asks as he removes a pair of sunglasses from the breast pocket of his tee shirt and puts them on, immediately pushing them up to the top of his head. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thanks.” Mike narrows his eyes at him as they begin walking toward the nearest Q31 bus stop. “What are you doing here?”

Harvey shrugs. “Well, I’m hoping _you’ll_ be the first person to congratulate _me_ after I ace the LSATs next month.”

You sly sonofabitch.

Mike looks down at his sneakers in an effort to hide his giddy grin. “So,” he remarks, “that brilliantly life-changing idea you had…”

Harvey knocks their shoulders together, grabbing Mike around the waist and pulling him into his side when he pretends to lose his balance.

“Definitely one of my finer moments.”

\---

**December**

Placing a notebook on the coffee table, Mike sits on the sofa and shoves his hands between his knees; when Grammy sits beside him, he leans forward to flip through the pages so frenetically that he passes the one he wants to show her and has to turn back to it.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Grammy remarks, and Mike offers a tight smile even though he knows she’s joking.

“Remember back in May,” he begins, “when I took all those AP exams, and you asked me what the point was since I already had straight As?”

Grammy nods, and Mike picks up the notebook, holding it at arm’s length.

“Well, the point is that some colleges will let you use AP exams for course credit, if you score high enough, and since I got all fives and fours,” he points to a table titled “CEEB AP CHART 2000,” “I already have forty-four credits out of the hundred and eighty I need for a bachelor’s degree at Stanford University.”

Reaching into the back of the notebook, Mike removes a folded piece of paper with the Stanford seal on it and flips the top section up.

_Dear Michael,_

_Congratulations! On behalf of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to Stanford’s Class of 2004._

Grammy takes the letter from his hand and holds it closer to her eyes, unfolding the lower third to read the whole thing as though there’s anything more it could say to surprise her.

When she’s through, she folds it up again and hands it back to him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“They mailed in on the fifteenth,” he says, flipping the top section open again and pointing to the dated header, “and I only got it yesterday.”

“Still, Michael, this is big news!”

“I had to prepare this whole presentation, it took some time!”

She bats him on the shoulder with her open hand and he makes a poor effort at dodging it, holding the letter up to protect himself.

“Really though,” he presses, dropping the letter on the coffee table and presenting the notebook again, “really, look, Stanford accepts all these exams for course credit, so I only need a hundred and thirty-six more credits to graduate, and if I take classes all four quarters, I can finish in two years.”

She takes the notebook from him and lays her hand on the page beside the table, running her fingers under each line of text as she reads. It’s airtight, he knows it is, he and Harvey have been over it a dozen times, but he can’t keep from biting down nervously on the inside of his cheek, sinking his incisor into the skin at the corner of his mouth. What if she says _no,_ what if she says _why,_ what if she says _don’t do this to me,_ what if…what if something he hasn’t even though of? What if this is the worst idea ever?

What if, what if, shut up.

Grammy places the notebook in his lap and pats it gently, and Mike holds his breath.

“It looks like you’ve really thought this through.”

He nods hurriedly.

“And I can come home for a little while during winter break,” he babbles, “and spring break, and there are some long weekends in the fall semester—”

“Michael,” she interrupts. “Michael, calm down, will you? I’m old, I’m not a damn invalid. I’ll see you when you have time to come home, and you spend the rest of your energy on your studies. Are you listening to me, young man,” she chastises when he opens his mouth to disagree, “this is one hell of a plan you’ve come up with, one you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into, and I don’t want to see you taking time away from fulfilling this dream of yours just because you think you need to hover over me every second of every day!”

“But Grammy—”

“But nothing! The matter is _closed,_ “ she declares, “and I won’t hear another word about it.”

Suddenly eight years old again, or maybe nine, Mike shuts his mouth and looks down at his hands, down at the notebook laid out in front of him, at all the planning and the meticulous scheduling and the good fortune he’s had and the hard work he’s done, and all the hard work left to do, at the path he’s laid out for himself, the quest he’s embarking on, and he’s not a child anymore, he’s not.

Mike sighs.

“Grammy?”

“Just make sure to write every now and again,” she says. “Maybe a phone call once in awhile.”

He smiles. “I will.”

It’s been a long, long night.

She smiles back and leans toward him, looking up at his face. “Michael, are you alright?”

He could tell her now. Tell her about Harvey, about their plans, about their lives so intertwined, about all of it.

“I…”

Eventually he’ll have to say something.

He shakes his head.

“I’m fine.”

Probably.

\---

**2000**

**November**

To the best of his knowledge, none of the other students in Mike’s class have ever received an actual memo from the mailroom instructing them to empty their boxes or risk all the mail being destroyed, but when he finally finds a minute to run to the Administrative Building before he runs to the dining hall before he runs back to his room to finish writing two different papers at the same time, he understands how no one else has ever let their situation get quite this bad.

To be fair, though, most of the mail is comprised of the thirty-odd club and event flyers Stanford’s sent him, plus two notices from the Psychology department looking for volunteers for some vaguely described “study”; then there’s one letter from Grammy, probably not telling him anything she didn’t say on their phone call the other day, and there’s a takeout menu from some pizza place he’s never heard of, and finally, both at the bottom of the pile for some reason despite being postmarked about two weeks apart and the more recent of the two having arrived only yesterday, two letters bearing only the strikingly impersonal Harvard Law School crest as their return address.

Mike tosses most of the flyers and the menu in the trash as he exits the Administrative Building, tearing open the older of the two Harvard letters as he walks.

_Dear Mike,_

_You know that being an English major means you have to do more than just read a lot of books, right? I mean I’m flattered, and you deserve what’s coming to you for putting this insane idea in my head to go to law school, but_

“Mike!”

“Huh?”

He looks up to find Lola Jensen, the friendly biology major who lives across the hall from him and his roommate Harold, suddenly walking beside him with a suspiciously sly look on her face.

“So how’ve you been?”

“Busy,” he says as he folds Harvey’s letter back up, sliding it back into its envelope. “You?”

“You’re always busy,” she chides. “Hey, you know the Psych department pays out fifty bucks to anyone who sticks it out for the entire trial.”

Mike glances down at the one flyer still in his hand. “They’d better be, if they want five hours a week for the entire quarter. You gonna do it?”

“Are you kidding,” she scoffs, “I don’t have five hours a week.”

Plus, it’s not like Lola needs the money; her family is filthy rich, and he knows she only brought it up for Mike’s benefit. She’s a nice girl, and she means well.

“But whatever,” she goes on, “I think the important question is what’s _Harvard Law School_ doing writing to _you?_ ”

Pointlessly, Mike stuffs the envelopes into his jacket pocket. “I’m applying there next year,” he says, “they send me some promotional literature sometimes.”

Stepping out in front of him, Lola puts her hand on Mike’s shoulder and stops him walking. “Mike.”

He pushes past her and keeps on toward their dorm. “I gotta—”

“Just tell me one thing,” she implores, keeping pace at his side. “Amy has been bugging me since September to set you guys up on a date, and I’ve been putting it off because I like you, and I respect your integrity and your batshit insane work ethic, but she’s my friend and I don’t want to have to keep making shit up if I could just tell her you’re taken. So.”

Mike winces, and Lola shrugs her shoulders nearly up to her ears.

“You already got a girlfriend or what?”

“No,” he answers reflexively, flinching at the unintentional misdirect as he reaches past her to open the door to Larkin House.

“Fuck,” Lola mutters. “So do you want me to set you up with Amy?”

“No,” he says. “Thanks.”

As the front door slams behind them, one of the doors down the hall opens with a soft click; Mike looks up to find Harold standing in front of them with a relieved expression on his face that for some reason makes Mike’s stomach tighten.

“Thank god,” Harold breathes. “Mike, I’m so sorry, your phone was ringing and I just picked it up without thinking, and it’s someone named, um, Harvey? He’s still there, I—I told him to hang on a second, do you want to talk to him?”

It’s innocuous. It’s totally innocuous, there’s no way Harold knows who Harvey is and no way Lola could’ve figured it out from that simple description. It’s an innocent message, an old friend from high school, don’t worry about it, thanks I got this.

Mike forces himself to smile.

“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll be right there.”

Harold nods, turning back into their room. “Sir?” Mike hears as the door swings shut. “Mike will…”

Mike throws his shoulders back and clears his throat. Everything is fine.

Lola looks up at him carefully.

No, it isn’t.

“Mike?” she ventures. He shakes his head.

It’s not what you think.

Yeah, it is.

“Please don’t say anything.”

“I won’t,” she assures him at once, “I promise. And I know you’re gonna be out of here after next year, you’re not looking for friends or confidants or whatever. But, just so you know…”

“Thank you,” he interrupts, putting his hands up. “Thanks. But I’m fine.”

Nodding carefully, she retreats into her own room, and Mike takes a deep breath.

“Harold,” he says, opening the door to their room. “Thanks man, can you gimme a few minutes?”

Visibly relieved that Mike isn’t furious with him for answering his phone and somehow violating his privacy or whatever, Harold grabs a book off his desk and hurries out to the common area as Mike picks up the receiver, raising it to his ear and dropping into his desk chair.

“Hey,” he sighs. “Sorry I haven’t written in awhile, I’ve been so busy I literally just emptied my mailbox for the first time in a month.”

“Admirable,” Harvey replies, and Mike smirks, slipping almost immediately into a worried frown.

“You never call,” he says. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Harvey assures him. “You know, midterms, papers, finals, readings, papers. Reading papers. No more hectic than the usual. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Aww,” Mike croons, “you _miss_ me.”

“Of course I do,” Harvey says indignantly. “Don’t you?”

“You asshole, you know I do.”

“Well there you go.”

Mike laughs, leaning his chair back on its rear legs. It hasn’t even been that long since they last saw each other, technically, and in a lot of ways, this is better than things were back at Ulysses Grant.

In a lot of ways.

“Hey, Harvey,” Mike says, righting his chair. Harvey hums inquiringly and Mike puts his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand. “I didn’t…tell her, or anything, but my friend Lola, she kind of found out about us? That, I mean, that’s okay, right? We’re gonna be fine, right?”

“We are,” Harvey assures him immediately. “Don’t worry about it, Mike. No one at Stanford knows who we are, or what happened, and even if they did, we didn’t do anything illegal. Nothing’s going to happen, we’re going to be fine. We _are_ fine.”

It sounds like the truncated version of a speech Harvey’s been waiting to make for a long time. Mike tips his chair back again and lets his head loll over the backrest.

“I know,” he murmurs. “I don’t know why I’m so worried about this.”

Harvey takes a sharp breath in and blows it out in a low whistle.

“Alright look,” he says tightly. “I was planning on making this a surprise, but I think I should tell you about it now, and you tell me if you’re not okay with it and I’ll work something out, okay?”

Mike’s chair falls forward onto the floor with a loud thump. “What?”

Harvey clears his throat. “I took a course earlier this semester where I had to do a ton of contract negotiation and corporate compliance shit,” he summarizes, “and my professor seems to think I have a knack for it, so he recommended me to an internship this summer.”

“That’s awesome!” Mike cuts in, jolting upright as though he’s been electroshocked. “I mean, yeah, that’s a big deal, you—you have to do it, right, and I mean I’m gonna have to be here at school all summer anyway but we’ll see each other some other time, maybe next winter break I’ll be home for more than a week, we can coordinate, it’ll be fine.”

“Hang on,” Harvey warns. “The thing is, the internship is in Palo Alto.”

The internship is in…Palo Alto. The city two and a half miles away from Stanford, that Palo Alto?

Mike braces his free hand on his desk. “Palo Alto,” he repeats, just be sure he didn’t mishear. “You’re going to be spending the summer. The _entire summer._ The entire summer _this summer._ You’re going to be in Palo Alto.”

An entire summer with Harvey practically within arm’s reach. In the back of his mind, Mike braces himself for the catch, because surely there has to be _something._

“It’s an option.”

An _entire summer_ with Harvey. They could pull it off, couldn’t they? It’s only three months, they could do it.

Couldn’t they?

Well, there’s the catch.

That’s not the point.

“‘It’s an option,’” Mike mimics. “Harvey, your professor offered you an internship. You’re only a first year, and your professor _offered you an internship._ “

“Mm-hm,” Harvey agrees. “But I can still turn it down. I’ve got all next semester to make a great impression on someone else and get something a little closer to home.”

Is he that selfish? Mike closes his eyes as he shakes his head in response to his own question.

“No, Harvey, no,” he says. “I mean, thank you for telling me about this, thank you for asking my opinion, but you have to take this internship. Anyway I’m only allowed to take sixteen credits in the summer quarter, so I’ll have a lot more free time to figure out how to do this, and it only takes like fifteen minutes to bike to Palo Alto, so I’ll be able to get to you, you won’t have to come on campus if you don’t want to, and it’ll be easier than last year, or the year before that, and you’re right, no one here knows me, or knows you, it’s not like they can fire you for violating protocol—”

“Breathe,” Harvey instructs with a smile in his voice, and Mike pauses, only slightly lightheaded.

Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.

“I love you,” Mike says.

They’re not very impressive words, but it’s too late to change them.

Mike smiles in spite of himself.

“I love you too,” Harvey murmurs, and Mike wonders if he’s alone, whatever room he’s in, or if he’s speaking so quietly just because he wants to.

They’ll figure it all out somehow.

“So,” Mike says with a mighty effort to sound energetic, “I guess I’ll be seeing you this summer!”

“Hey Mike?”

“Yeah?”

Harvey pauses, and Mike knows he hasn’t fooled either of them. It’s okay; they’re in this together. All of it.

“We’ll figure it out.”

Mike nods.

“Definitely.”

I know it.

\---

**2001**

**July**

Having nodded off at his desk, again, Mike wakes to a knocking sound so persistent, so frustrated, that he has to believe it’s been going on for some time. He wonders if he was snoring, if maybe Harvey heard it through the door.

“Yeah,” he calls, pressing his fingertips to his eyes as the latch clicks.

“That’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Harvey remarks, closing the door behind him and flipping the tumbler, as he always does.

“Cheap college dorm,” Mike retorts, pointing to himself, as he always does. “Broke college student.”

Harvey grins. “Not for long.”

Closing his eyes tight and springing them open in an effort to convince his brain that he’s truly awake, Mike notices three envelopes, two letter-sized and one manila, clutched in Harvey’s hand, none of which he seems to be making any effort to conceal.

“What’re you doing with my mail?” he asks, standing from his chair and rolling his shoulders back.

“The mailing department called me, you idiot,” Harvey says. “Empty your damn box once in awhile.”

“They called _you?_ ”

“They called your local emergency contact.”

Mike nods slowly, and Harvey shakes his head.

“You should thank me for throwing out all the takeout menus. Is that what you people eat?”

“You got a better idea?” Mike asks as he reaches out for his mail.

“You live on Cup Noodles like real undergrads,” Harvey declares, holding out the manila envelope, “or die trying.”

Sighing dramatically, Mike takes it and rips it open before it occurs to him to read the return address stamp, which is the only excuse he can come up with on the spot for how startled he is by the boldface heading “LAW SCHOOL ADMISSION TEST.”

“Holy shit.”

There it is, Average Score, right in the middle of the left column.

“Don’t leave the rest of us in suspense,” Harvey prompts.

Pressing his lips together coyly, Mike turns the paper around. “One eighty.”

Harvey grins proudly, thumping Mike’s shoulder with his free hand and holding up the other two envelopes. “I knew it,” he says. “Got you a little present to celebrate.”

“You brought me my mail?” Mike asks skeptically, reaching out to take them and frowning when Harvey leans away.

“These look like they’re addressed to you?” Harvey asks. Mike tilts his head; on closer inspection, no, they’re both addressed to Harvard Law School.

“You brought me…your mail?” he guesses, and Harvey heaves a put-upon sigh.

“I brought you,” he drawls, “a recommendation letter from Principal Jessica Pearson, and one from a Mister Henry Gerard, who just so happens to be a pretty well-regarded professor of legal ethics at Harvard Law School.”

“You _what?_ ” Mike snatches the envelopes from Harvey’s hand, his eyes wide as he goggles at the return addresses and then looks at Harvey frantically. “ _How?_ ”

Harvey plucks the envelopes back from Mike’s grip. “Jessica was more than happy to do it,” he says, “and as for Professor Gerard, let’s just say the guy’s got a weakness for chips.”

Clasping his hands behind Harvey’s neck, Mike grins. “You won a recommendation letter for me in a poker game with your ethics professor?”

“Me and that twenty-page paper you wrote last year on _Gravity’s Rainbow_ , so thanks for sending that along,” Harvey confirms. “Can’t say I never do anything for you.”

“I would never.”

Harvey chuckles as Mike leans forward to kiss him.

“You’re the best boyfriend ever.”

Sliding his hand up into Mike’s hair and angling his head to the left, Harvey kisses him again.

“You bet I am.”

\---

**2002**

**December**

“Hey, Harvey,” Mike muses, walking into their rather small off-campus apartment’s rather small bedroom and brandishing a computer printout. “I just got my course assignments for spring semester and I have… _one_ quick question.”

Glancing up over the top of the weighty-looking book he’s reading, Harvey raises his eyebrows quizzically. “You don’t say.”

“Yeah, so.” Mike crawls up the bed until he can shove his schedule in Harvey’s face. “You’re TA-ing my Lawyering class?”

Harvey lowers his gaze back to his book. “Am I?”

“ _Harvey._ ”

“Mike.” Harvey folds down the corner of the page he’s on and drops the book on the floor beside him. “My Corporate advisor told me to sign up. You know how good that position looks on a résumé?”

Mike furrows his brow. “But aren’t you already a research assistant?”

“Yeah, but it’s for the same professor.”

Climbing around Harvey to sit beside him, Mike tucks his knees up to his chest and rests his chin on them, curling forward in a weak effort to quell the sudden hollowness in his stomach. “Oh.”

“Hey.” Harvey slings his arm across Mike’s shoulders and rubs his hand up and down his arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Mike answers reflexively. “It’s just…you know.”

“What?”

Mike shrugs. “Doesn’t this feel kind of familiar?”

_We can’t._

But can't we?

After a moment, Harvey turns toward Mike and drags him in to rest against his chest, pressing a kiss to his forehead.

_Is this nothing? Or is it something?_

Mike reaches up to put his hand over Harvey’s, still on his shoulder. Even after all this time, after everything that’s happened and everything that hasn’t, can’t he just get over his goddamn hang-ups? Doesn’t Harvey deserve more? Better? Doesn’t Mike owe it to him? Doesn’t he owe it to both of them?

“Mike,” Harvey says, “I took this position because my advisor recommended it, and it’ll help me land a job after I graduate. Gunn is teaching three sections, I had no idea I’d be assigned to yours, and the last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable.”

Mike nods. “I know.”

_I don’t want to be alone._

“But you gotta know this situation is completely different.” Harvey looks into Mike’s eyes imploringly. “Right? We’re both students, we’re both adults, we know what we’re doing. There’s no conflict of interest, there’s no way anyone can hold this over either of our heads, and I promise I’m going to treat you exactly the same as I treat all the other students in your section, no favoritism or taking out my frustrations on you or anything.”

Bending his neck down, Mike gently headbutts Harvey right under his clavicle.

“I know.”

Harvey threads his fingers into the hair at the back of Mike’s head and rests his chin just above his hand.

“I love you.”

Mike nods.

“Hey, Harvey.”

Harvey shifts back until he’s more or less lying underneath Mike, reaching up to cup his chin when Mike braces his hands against the mattress to hover over him.

“Yeah.”

Mike sets his mouth into a firm line.

“We got this.”

Harvey smiles.

“Yeah we do.”

Mike isn’t sure exactly why, not that it matters, but the room seems a little different all of a sudden in some all-encompassing, invisible sort of way. Then Harvey leans up to kiss him again, and this is his life, and this is what he’s doing with it, and it’s a pretty good one, all in all; out the window, the sky is a hazy sort of grey, the air somehow visibly cold, and Mike is glad to be inside where everything is soft and warm.

The wall clock ticks over to eleven eleven, and everything is going to be just fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The law Mike is referring to, about shooting people versus forcing them to compete in an eight-hour bike race, is [§ 245.05](https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/245.05) of New York State Senate Penal Law (Offensive exhibition).
> 
> [Borough of Manhattan Community College](http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/j2ee/index.jsp) (BMCC) has a 97% acceptance rate.
> 
> [Bayside High School](http://www.baysidehighschool.org/) is a public high school in Queens, New York which administers AP exams.
> 
> Mike begins at Stanford in 2000; his viable AP credits, education requirements, financial aide situation and so forth are culled from [Stanford Bulletin 1999-2000](https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ck552ft4720), [Stanford News Service](https://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/00/000216tuition.html) (circa 02/16/2000), [Stanford Bulletin 2000-2001](http://web.stanford.edu/dept/registrar/bulletin_past/bulletin00-01/index.html), and [Stanford University Common Data Set: 2000-2001](https://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/cds_2000).
> 
> Larkin is one of the houses making up [Stern Hall](https://rde.stanford.edu/studenthousing/stern-hall), a coed all-freshmen residence hall at Stanford.
> 
> The class Harvey took in which he impressed his professor was [Corporations 100](https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427005866%2466i), which was a first-year elective at Harvard Law in 2000.
> 
> Palo Alto is right next to Stanford, and according to Google Maps, they’re a twelve- to fifteen-minute bike ride apart, depending on the route.
> 
> 180 is the maximum possible LSAT score.
> 
> Harvey isn’t technically a TA, but one of the “specially trained 3L upper class students” teaching workshop meetings for Mike’s [First-Year Lawyering](https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427005870%2489i) class.
> 
> Harvey is specializing in Corporate Law, whereas Mike plans to specialize in Human Rights Law.
> 
> “Don’t think about it too much, just do it. For a change of pace. It might help you figure out all kinds of things.”  
> — _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_
> 
> They were not very impressive words, but it was too late to change them.  
> — _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_
> 
> Katzman, J. (1997). _Best 311 Colleges, 1998 Edition_. New York, NY: Princeton Review.  
>  Murakami, H. (1997). _The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle_. New York, NY: Vintage Books.  
>  New York State Statute (1997). _Penal Law of the State of New York_. Queens, NY: Looseleaf Law Publications.


End file.
